Beatrice Meoni

It is the acrobat’s body, the performer’s body, it is my changing body that rebels, transforms itself through the senses in the space of the pictorial surface, evaporating towards abstraction as well as condensing itself into an engraved sign to anticipate its becoming fragile.

It is the body that transforms its experience into a sign.

It's a scratch on the ascetic's wall.

The color lifts the body from its state. It makes it aerial. It confuses and welcomes it. It is the color of the folds of the body. It is the color of a dream.

Beatrice Meoni

Beatrice Meoni
(Florence, 1960)

The dimension of the relationship inherent in the pictorial practice of Beatrice Meoni can be linked in various ways to her training and to her past activity as a set designer. In different moments of her research, the interest in the theater understood as a comparison between devices and techniques, but also as a field of relationship between space, bodies and objects, has germinated in processes and modalities that have introduced her painting into an expanded horizon.

Listening and confrontation, connected to dialogical practice as a crucial moment of knowledge and questioning of the self, are the basis of some projects that Meoni has developed and shared with artists.

By displacing the intimate tensions of a frequentation practice conducted in the atelier in the public space of the exhibition, the group exhibition has become the meeting point for research, gazes and personal stories.

A need that from the shared experience has become the foundation of an individual practice as a comparison with places and their identities, in close relationship with objects and with one’s own body.

The body is at the center of a series of works presented in 2019 in the solo exhibition Tra un atto e l’altro, curated by Davide Ferri (Sarzana, Galleria Cardelli & Fontana).

The title, taken from a novel by Virginia Woolf (Between the Acts) that ideally accompanied the realization of the paintings, brings attention to the pictorial process as a moment of transition between one gesture and another, between a bodily movement and the pause determined by an unpredictable act that subverts order, continuity, stability.

In close relation to the formal and iconographic reflection of this pictorial cycle, an autobiographical event is identified: a fall that forces the artist to pause and that leads her to become aware of the fragility of the body and of a necessary rethinking of the limit as a possibility to rediscover a new order and a new posture through an exercise in “proprioception” – the ability to perceive and recognize one’s body and limb movement independently of sight.

Barely sketched bodies, fragments of arms and legs isolated or swirling in space are suspended in rarefied atmospheres, in a continuous alternation between arising and sinking of forms from the surface to the bottom.

From the object to the body, the fragment is for Beatrice Meoni the possibility of following the transformations, the unstable positioning of both in space and time, citing some parts rather than describing the whole. A moving away and approaching things and the body through painting.

In the private space of the atelier as in the hall of the Museum, Meoni’s works seek an organic relationship with the place. A relationship that, beyond geographies and history, becomes a “place of belonging”, intimately related to the becoming of painting as an experience, listening, representation of the self.

Lara Conte