Vania Elettra Tam

Como, 1968. Lives and works in Milan. The irony and seduction of Vania’s artworks are juxtaposed to a veiled social critique, but presented with an always delicate, amused and surreal gaze. Her fine and unstable everyday domestic microcosms show us the artist’s self-portrait while she investigates obsessive habits of ontemporary’s feminine world. The viewer is invited to play with forms and shadows, being aware that nothing is like it seems. Solo shows include: "conTAMinAzione" at Pallazzo Ragione (Mantua, IT); "Around the World in 30 Sq m" at NardiArt (Rome, IT); “OKO 10” at City Museum (Šibenik, HR); “Kanon” at WolandArt (Trieste, IT); "Doppia mentiS” at OrizzontiArt (Ostuni, IT); “Un giorno di ordinaria pulizia” and “Cronaca Rosa” at Wannabee Gallery (Milan, IT). She was included in the 54° Venice Biennale in Italian Pavillion special project at Palazzo Te in Mantua (IT). Selected group exhibitions: “Another story” at San Carpoforo (Milan, IT); “Acquisitions” at Parisi Valle Museum (Maccagno, IT); “Coexist” at E-lite Gallery (Lecce, IT); "Contemporary Iside" at Arcos Museum (Benevento, IT); "Plural Feminine" at Biffi Art (Piacenza, IT); "Aliens" at Ludovico Ariosto House (Ferrara, IT); “Cibi Condimentum Esse Famem” for EXPO 2015 (Milan, IT); “Perturbaciones” at National Museum of Fine Arts (Habana, Cuba); “Art Basel Mania” FushionArt (Miami - USA); “Artists & Authors” at Art Institute (San Diego, USA); “Meeting of Italian artists” at Casanova Palace (Prague, CZ); “Book Art Project” at Baglioni Hotel (London, GB). Her solo show in Trieste was introduced by the famous English art critic Edward Lucie-Smith.

Realism does not mean to bring art back into reality. It means transport the reality in art;

not only to accept the vicissitudes of life but elevate them.

Laurence Olivier

I look at the first draft of "contamination" and comes me to mind the parallel between this Spreader of masterpieces and Charles Edouard Jeanneret, l ' "allontanatore" of crows. But is it true that Le Corbusier eager to take credit for this pseudonym alluding to the man who drove the crows from homes? And if so, it was a choice dictated by humility or

the arrogance of being the architecture savior, the one who protected her from

guano of crackling disfuguerers winged? Certainly Vania, in the painting that gives the title to

this exhibition, is depicted as a domestic worker busy dusting the camera picta, with a real duty of humility profession. The idea that in the role of an artist is intent symbolically to remove the spiderwebs from the art of the past, in fact, it goes against her vis ironica indeed, primarily self-deprecating. Tam includes it in her paintings for a choice of responsibility, to share the neuroses of his characters, to affirm their membership in the category of housewives frustrated, the couch potatoes, the compulsive goers of the supermarkets, the dreamers from gravure, of incurable gullible, the warriors of everyday life. And 'its a "Let us arm ourselves and start", never an "arm yourselves and leave."

To lend their likeness to the characters of her paintings she does not make herself as a hero, but a woman multiplied, able to live deeply all the experiences of her role, digging in herself, revealing dreams and needs, passions, expectations, disappointments, weaknesses and determination. One senses, in this great fresco artaudiano, in this daily theater of cruelty, that the protagonist is the woman in her complexity and not the one who lends her image to make more credible the narration. We do not even touch the idea that there is a Vania / Barbie in a hundred different versions: all lead back images to a much broader concept, custom, even abstract, where the housewife, the dreamer, the frustrated, the career woman or the domestic worker are nothing but the same woman, with many facets that belong to herself, an intriguing woman, naive and bewitching, demure and shameless, a varied summary of femininity. As in a mad kaleidoscope images are doubled and recompose, presenting infinite variables, winking and venial provocations, naive or shameless, puns, double meanings that are followed in an irresistible whirlwind of contamination with literature, cinema, comics, Renaissance art, puzzles, the glossies.

The everywoman Vania Elettra Tam clings to the dream, the fantasy, the sensitivity to the peculiar qualities of the woman, to escape the monotony of everyday life: an ironing board becomes a surfboard with which dizzying ride waves; great aspirations come to mind when you grab a vacuum cleaner; the lady with the broom, worthily replaces the ermine; while the shape of a chicken on the floor projecting our friend in an intriguing thriller, directly at the crime scene. No shortage shy and distant ladies(but only in appearance) of origami clitoral, or housewives sexy disturbing Gossip, surrounded by sex toys used in the most inappropriate ways, to pretend naive forgotten. Abnormal appears Kanon cycle - regoleferree where the ladies represented are trapped in strange torture mechanisms that secure their mouth, eyes, nose with some sort of chastity belts for the head, living witnesses of coercion and restriction of personality, where 'irony gives way to a less veiled social criticism than other cycles. But as always, talking about Vania Elettra Tam, lets not forget to emphasize the skill, rare graphics capabilities, the originality of the sign ... And 'the fate of those who have something to say and knows externalize with their art: the end there is such a perfect symbiosis between what everyone is and how is, that we focus not to measure the individual components of the work, as saying that the graphics is taken for granted in a display that resembles a script, in works visual that are in fact stories. In Vania is a clash: it is as if the mind defied his hand to realize their thoughts more complex and bizarre, but noone can ever be won in a draw without end that is the most precious gift and the less burdensome condemnation for Vania .

Carlo Micheli

"Kanon- strict rules" by Franca Marri:

The artist elaborates portraits of Renaissance overlaping their faces of new iron gadgets aimed to correct their faces: too thin lips, noses a little 'crooked, too small eyes, foreheads, or minds too prominent. The canon of beauty, classical memory, once again intends to put order in a nature that seems resigned to undergo any artifice in the name of a dogma with no more meaning, in the name of something that no longer appears as an aspiration but only a form of coercion, an absurd convention. Everything always filtered through the varied universe of women that the entire work of Vania Elettra Tam is the protagonist of an imaginary both real and unreal, ironic and oneiric, alienating and detector, capable of unmasking with intelligence and lightness of the many facets of their insecurities and frailties.

Double Mentis, refers to the creation of an atmosphere far removed from the mythological Narcissus but close to that of one lucid dreaming. The real world is separate (and combined) in the alternative by an imaginary line, the horizon. The image above, the specular reflection, does not correspond exactly to what is below, it is a form of protest, a conscious sign of rebellion and disobedience to the rules of the game. And yet, that line that unites and separates them, seems to speak of a higher power, which forces the two worlds to remain united in spite of them there is a clear desire to go in opposite directions. From the point of view of iconography is felt the artist's urgency, to synthesize the image and reduce the color palette to resist the temptation to fill the gaps and reach not simplicity, but a secret complexity

Rhodiola Rosea is a plant used in natural medicine with extraordinary properties which, if taken regularly, restores emotional balance. Vania Elettra Tam titled this way  this cycle of paintings which depicts strange ancestral and tentacled creatures that cling to female figures in a kind of ritual dance, weaving a mixture ratio. What the artist wants to represent is an act of rebirth and reconstruction. Following the discovery of some folders of a textile company in Como, containing hand-made drawings, Vania has decided to include those works within her ones. Thus, artifacts destined for pulping because they were considered useless, they recovered a new validity and returned meaning to those symbols of Indian origin, mistakenly considered decorative, representing the life and eternity.

A pop painting, of clear illustrative inspiration, is  Vania Elettra Tam one, who uses the self-portrait as a pretext to investigate leitmotif tics and obsessions of contemporary femininity. The artist portrays alter ego engaged in trivial daily actions, such as makeup, bathing or cooking, casting fantastic shadows on the home, which does not coincide with the gestures and movements of real actors. It builds an ironic narrative, which runs parallel to the events depicted in the foreground, as a kind of visual hypertext. Her one is, therefore, a figure that mixes mimesis realistic and fantastic transfiguration, disseminating images of circumstantial details, which suggest a key of interpretation.

In suspended series - extremely ironic as exemplary from the title - female figures are portrayed as acrobats on wires of life, each in the flow of their days, the daily activities of their work. Each work is going to tell us how much effort play women. It is not that difficult

to try to identify with them. After all, even today, maybe more than ever, for a woman to manage in this society - sometimes violent - would become a tightrope walker. The female figures that the artist paints are never alone, there is someone behind, someone who the artist's imagination, as in a Chinese shadow play, knows how to transform into particular shapes, companions of a solitude that makes leaked a certain melancholy.

Vania Elettra Tam is a philosopher of our time with a light tone, almost like a talk show, she manages to say things really terrible. Spiced with irony shrewd and cruel this is loneliness that you breathe - drowned in pink. From inside her paintings, which portrays herself along with closest friends, or from outside, with her wide-eyed about the world, she observes everything with a smile on her face unreadable. In conclusion, if her waving pink banner is the banner of a desperate loneliness or an established freedom it is up to us to decide.

It is difficult to find an artist with such technical quality and attention to detail that chooses to put them to service of an ironic and irreverent language. It reminded me of the attitude of some artists who, the day after the promulgation of the art standards established by the Council of Trento, have fun  irreverently with private clients, creating true masterpieces. The kitchen, the bathroom, the living room, the bedroom, and everyday tools that accompany the housewife in the repetitive rhythm of the housework, transformed to give rise to a plausible unreality, where every scene acquires an epic, poetic and theatrical flavour. One world, the one imagined by Vania Elettra Tam, which is granted to anyone, with few resources and a lot of imagination, to feel goddess or diva, saint or sinner, queen or commoner.

Luci.A  is the acronym that would symbolize both a series of paintings dedicated to artificial lights, and representing a woman stereotype immersed in her daily domestic solitude. Computer, television, mobile phone, navigation system and every technological object provides convenient and countless advantages, but it also causes isolation, making each individual prisoner of trends. The lights you can see in these works do not have the role of facilitating, but are issued by electric or electronic items, that once you enter our everyday life, gradually they take over with their invasiveness, becoming indispensable, "artificial" companions of our fragile and lonely existence.