"Over the discreet"

OVER THE DISCREET

Over the horizon, over the look, over the visibile.
For every earthly thing there is an over and the same concept of "Over" always presupposes a limit, an opening, a distinction to be overcome.
In the paintings of Concetta Russo you enter into the discreet to overcome it through unexpected ways and possibilities, letting yourself be carried away by the magic of a silence without time or place. It is the expanded space of the image that becomes matter and just after spirituality. In those figures often quiescent and slide gently into a voluntary abandonment, seem to vibrate the tensions of the senses and above all the restless soul twists. The chromatisms sometimes bright dissolve in melancholy tones changing to "night" even in bright sunlight. There is in the paintings of Russo, a sentiment of time that pass the time to be eternal wandering and eternal becoming.
Sometimes appears the image of an animal that supports the figure in an initiatory path like a cycle of life or an aspect peculiar and deep, offering the viewer a symbolic reading and sometimes mystical of pictorial universe of this artist. If the design is expressive force and energy, painting is the alchemical device that adopts the artist to cover the work with a layer of discreet , inviting and encouraging the viewer to lift it to go beyond that discreet so you can access another dimension more introspective and meditative. The paths that lead to true life, often depart not from life, but rather by its many ravines, its many shades, from its many fold and bend, so it must be arranged with the eyes and especially with the mind in a state that is able to follow, to travel and cross images. Because images are like a "medium", they are through establishing contacts and connections between what is visible and what is not, between what is real and what is not, between appearance and essence. And Concetta Russo knows. In her painting there is a whole world of circumstances and inner existential possibility, always mentioned and never unravel, discrete enough to provoke in the viewer looking those works the temptation to overcome them and reach its true essence. Get into the paintings of Russo is like stepping into the silence wary of an elegy, allowing the thought rest upon all colors and shades, on every line and form, to feel, finally, that there is an intelligence of heart that reason does not and only art discloses to us opening ourselves to his mystery. "All that not we clench in us, do not take the wind away, it takes away the world" (Milo Rossi), as the poet says, and it is a great and profound truth, because every precious thing longs to clothe itself in a aura of discreet, that's why the things that matter and which remain in our hearts, are all hidden from the eyes of the world.
Concetta is an artist whose intimate and pictorial sensibility, able to tune into the secret harmony of those precious things that have no voice, giving them a face and a form that then his thoughts enlightens and making them alive and visible. This is one of the enigmas of existence: reality It is only a plot of invisible and misleading appearances, but how much more will be able to go beyond the discreet, more it approaches the real. In this sense, every works of Russo transports us towards what we hold most familiar and usual, with the specific intention of making us discover soon after that is also what we hold most alien and unknown. Everything what we do not know in this world, an artist like Russo, she imagines and realizes it, making it possible in their own world.

Maria Rita Montagnani

(Art critic / independent curator)