Love

Love is part of the trilogy Love-Birth-Death, realized by Luisa Rabbia from 2016 to 2017. "Love (2016) is a canvas that for its full diagonal (a size thus bigger than its width) is occupied by two hyperhuman bodies so interlaced that if an attempt were made to unite in a diagram their sticking out points these would form the equivalent of a sephirotic tree. Love imagines (puts into image) the initial/initiating couple, a copula of earth and sky; the woman is made of earth, vegetation, humus, roots, the man is an ethereal body, made of star dust. The primal couple not yet emerged from Chaos, of indistinct anatomies, suspended in a space and a time not yet divided into opposing modalities, and crossed like lightning or a tree trunk by the axis of the world. […] In Rabbia’s painting, the original couple is imaged in a state antecedent to any division of being into the duality created by the advent of time. […] These are bodies of plasmatic consistency, anthropomorphic nebulae in the process of becoming fully human, ethereal bodies close to accessing the astral body, or vice versa. The Bible would not have a name for them, for they imply a pre-Adamic stage and yet have been inscribed for centuries, for millennia even, in history, which is the history of painting. The fishbone/spine of dark energy that diagonally crosses the joint bodies, the picture’s axis both physical and metaphysical, […] converges analogically here with the mystical/mysterical energy that kundalini generates in bodies intertwined in tantric ecstasy: it becomes the tree of inner life. The liquid sky or the celestial water in which the hierogamy of Love takes place, from which the lovers emerge, is the hieroglyph of a mythical, resistant pictorial space, a space that suspends painting between a barely begun past and a future already finished." - Excerpt from Blue.The Resistance of Painting by Mario Diacono, published in the book Love on the occasion of the eponymous Luisa Rabbia’s solo-exhibition at the Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia.