Variations

Gianna Albertin presents the most recent results of her explorations in the field of small-scale ceramic sculpture. By distancing herself from both figurative and informal approaches, the artist favors an abstraction not without visionary allusions. Symbolic form, understood not as a category of experience but classically as a configuration that incorporates a symbol, can be considered the notion capable of unifying the seemingly surprising variety of directions and perspectives on which we are invited to dwell. By almost oxymoronically associating the clarity and definition of form with the inexhaustibility and polysemy of the symbol, the expression conveys the fruitful contradiction of clearly structured works that contain a wealth of meanings and content. It remains undecided whether the primary matrix of the proposal should be traced back to the subjective reading of experience or rather to the emergence of possibilities and values in which the world offers itself. The salient features in each work—such as the reference to the inorganic/mineral, or alternatively to the living/biological, to immobility/stability, or to development/dynamism/evolution, to gathering/closure/protection, or conversely to expansive/aggressive projection into space, to singularity/solitude, or to multiplicity/repetition—seem to point toward the second alternative, which emphasizes the revelation of constitutive aspects of reality. But perhaps, more plausibly, the images of the psyche and the scenarios of the world refer to each other, in a relationship between two poles, neither of which can be considered ultimately decisive.