Gruppo di cose vicine (1985) by Montessori ElisaLa Galleria Nazionale
"Io dico io" is already an affirmation that has in itself a character of offence and defence. Offence because it claims your subjectivity. Defence because you are afraid that others will enter you. It is a preliminary, but it cannot be a human law, because I am always you and you are always me! I say that I exist, but my claim to subjectivity is always relational. I've never had any doubts about my identity.
I am a painter, I am pragmatic, I need painting as I need breathing. Our condition was terribly repressive, we suffered real amputations, fractures. In this sense, all the claims from Lonzi were justified. It was a necessary struggle in which I participated but, I confess, I do not know how far it has entered my practice.
One thing that has always been in my work is to see beyond; from my point of view, but beyond. This is a historical exhibition connecting different generations, with different problems, works, different lives. It is interesting because we talk about diversity in diversity. I donated the painting on display, Camera con vista, at Bruno Mantura’s invitation. The title is a kind of diaphragm of what is internal and external.
Ordine (1985) by Montessori ElisaLa Galleria Nazionale
Today the painting lives in the eyes of others, not mine. It exists because the gaze of others exists.
In feminism there have been few solid points, and one has been the possibility to speak out. The word was a taboo to me. It has always been; I've always drawn also because of this. I made the small drawings on Severini because I was invited to talk about a work in the collection but I had no voice! So I drew the things I saw in the painting: an intervention made on what I could do and see, without the voice. Odd, isn’t it? Today is different, you see, I'm talking to you! I speak because those inhibitions that I have been taught even before constraints have fallen. In old age I found a lot of freedom.
Elisa Montessori to Arianna Paragallo, 2021
Disordine (1985) by Montessori ElisaLa Galleria Nazionale
Elisa Montessori
(Genoa, 1931. She lives and works in Rome.)
Elisa Montessori’s training path did not pass through the Academy, but through the ateliers of artists known in Rome – where she moved to undertake university studies – and with whom she felt an affinity: brothers Mirko and Afro Basaldella, Corrado Cagli, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Dorazio, Perilli.an in 1965.
Her first exhibition, where she appeared as Lisa, dates back to 1951.
She was twenty years old and exhibited a series of monotypes in which she reverberated her interest in Dughet’s painting and a personal, international, free itinerary of suggestions. Then she exhibited in Hong Kong in 1958 and Taiwan in 1965.
Ordine (1985) by Montessori ElisaLa Galleria Nazionale
Beside her interest in Chinese art, she cultivated music, reading, family, and even her exhibition path followed a rhythm that was modulated over the time of her life:
“Yes, I chose to live with fullness. I’ve always done that. Art is also a living organism, involving the body. I have a physical relationship with paper, colors and shapes. It is the same as with human beings, with the couple, with the family. Certainly life’s demands create discontinuity in the creative work. […] The path usually outlined in the production of female artists, full of interruptions and resumptions, is one of the themes that I have tried to explore.”
Gruppo di cose vicine (1985) by Montessori ElisaLa Galleria Nazionale
Her studying time had never had interruptions, and in the 1970s she exhibited Tropismi, a series in which the landscape, the theme of her beginnings, was translated into a system of signs and lines in ink and built as if by budding. It was followed by the series of black and white drawings on paper that were characterized by a combinatorial logic: the sign expanded beyond the boundaries of the single sheet, the image was built through repetitions, combinations, pauses through a reticular structure, activated around generative nuclei.
I grappoli d'uva sono le cerniere di un vicino lontano (1985) by Montessori ElisaLa Galleria Nazionale
In the same period, the theme of Dafne, central to the artist’s poetics, made its first appearance.
In the 1980s, her drawing finally took on a monumental dimension through the use of large sheets of yellow graphic paper, on which the artist intervened with color and graphite. The drawing was then formed as if by an accumulation or a push within the given space, the boundaries of which remained unstable and determined by a tear. The image was often crossed by folds, as if the work were not only a drawing, but also a thing, which can be stored away once the work was finished.
Gruppo di cose vicine (1985) by Montessori ElisaLa Galleria Nazionale
The large drawing Camera con vista and the sheets of the series Ordine/Disordine and Gruppo di cose vicine/Gruppo di lontane belong to this period. Their subject was the gaze as the first relationship with the world:
“Elisa Montessori’s poetics starts from the act of looking and relating to the world as a body and a gaze, referring to the first writing of the hand, compulsive, free, at times violent, which leads to reproducing not what one sees in front of oneself but what one knows. A hand that knows more than the eye, with a memory that does not translate reality but records experience”.
Cecilia Canziani
Elisa Montessori and Cecilia Canziani
Works cited:
Interview with Elisa Montessori by Arianna Paragallo, February 2021
Elisa Montessori in Anne Marie Sauzeau, Sotto il segno di Dafne. Indagine sull’opera di Elisa Montessori, Punctum, p. 21.
I. Gianni, Ogni cosa è un’altra, in https://www.monitoronline.org/elisa-montessori-2/
