Maria Morganti

Silent dialogue is a hint of plurality, but the model is dialogue with another. Only because I can talk to others can I also talk to myself, that is, think.

H. Arendt, Oases in the desert

The understanding of myself (mine too) cannot be completely abstracted from the understanding that others have of me. [...] the “subject” of internal identity is not only the “I”, but also the “we”.

A. Heller, The Autobiographical Memory

What does “building a representation of oneself” mean?

How come to face this great effort of re-crossing oneself, disassembling oneself and then rebuilding oneself to be able to come up with a compact vision?

How to draw out an image first of all of oneself and then of others of a fragmented set of things?

Do these things together form a mass that can be defined as part of the body of one's work as an artist?

Overall, I could say that "Autoritratto" on my site is a confessional (...). What is constantly brought up are the analyzes of one's inclinations and ways of being, the constant reflections on the practice and on the forms that have come out of it. Sifting and filtering are the actions that I had to perform over about ten years to get to the juice, the distillate, the synthesis.

By "Autoritratto" I don't mean a narcissistic form of self-exposure, but a self-representation that goes in search of a relationship. You have to take charge of your intimacy, you can only start from yourself, from the uniqueness that each person represents.

It is only starting from one's own subjectivity and from one's mutual differences that I see a dialogue as possible. An individuality that can exist, however, only if it comes to relate to that of someone else.

I ask you spectators to help me understand what I am, to add an explanation to what I do. I am trying to support myself in my own construction not only in the space of my self-reflection but also in what is formed through your gaze.

https://www.mariamorganti.it/autoritratto/0-introduzione

Maria Morganti
(Milan, 1965. She lives and works in Venice.)

An image through which you can start describing Maria Morganti’s work is the pen with which her father wrote his diary, a practice of recording his own experience, but also of self-analysis and introspection, to which he had joined with consistency for most of his life. The photograph of this pen can be found under the heading Autoritratto of the online archive to which the artist entrusts the story of herself since, a few years ago, she felt the need to accompany the pictorial gesture with the word. Alongside the image of the pen, it might be useful to have one of the shots that make up the Tenersi per mano series, which documents the daily encounters between the artist and her mother through the close-up of two hands. “Maria, not the diary form, but the epistolary form! That's where thought opens up. It happens just when we imagine we are talking to someone!” she told her. Looking at the work by Maria Morganti from this perspective, which moves within the apparently tight meshes of abstract painting, allows us to recover a fact that is not only autobiographical, but shared by anyone who tries day by day to give narratable form – and through it meaning to one’s being in the world. Maria Morganti does it with painting, spreading one color a day on a surface, a color that is formed by adding a new color to the traces of that of the previous day in the bowl she uses as palette. It is a color that reflects the measure of time: we are mixed with our past, we are not born new to a new day. The color spread on the canvas covers that of the previous day, but it leaves a barely visible trace on the upper edge of the canvas. The edge of the picture is the place where the elapsed time is measurable, a thin line.
“Every single layer, every single color is already a painting, but we proceed to settle anyway, and every now and then we stop on a color. The choice to stop right there is relative. It is a particular color, but potentially it could be another. It is left to exist leaving it almost all the space. We take leave, we detach ourselves, we pause, like a suspension and we move on to something else.” The experience of time – of one's being in the world – passes through color, which is a gesture and is also a body: for this reason the canvases used by the artist correspond to only four measures: the hand, the face, the bust, the whole figure – another self-portrait. These paintings, which have been part of the artist's daily practice since 2003, are called Sedimentazioni and always complement the explorations conducted through color on other mediums such as photography, sculpture, installation. Another surface, a wooden stick one meter long and ten high, is the archive of each Sedimentazione, it preserves the trace of the temporal process of a painting creation: three months, five months, it is its Diario.

Cecilia Canziani

“Maria, non la forma diaristica, ma la forma epistolare! È lì che si apre il pensiero. Succede proprio quando immaginiamo di parlare con qualcuno!” le diceva. Guardare da questa prospettiva il lavoro di Maria Morganti, che si muove dentro le maglie apparentemente strette della pittura astratta, permette di recuperare un dato che non è solo autobiografico, ma condiviso da chiunque cerchi di giorno in giorno di dare forma narrabile – e attraverso di essa senso (A. Cavareo) – al proprio essere nel mondo.

Maria Morganti lo fa con la pittura, stendendo un colore al giorno su una superficie, un colore che si forma aggiungendo alla ciotola che usa per tavolozza colore nuovo alle tracce di quello del giorno precedente. E’ un colore che restituisce la misura del tempo: siamo impastati del nostro passato, non nasciamo nuovi a un nuovo giorno. Il colore steso sulla tela copre quello del giorno precedente di cui però lascia una traccia appena visibile sul bordo superiore della tela. Il margine del quadro è il luogo dove il tempo trascorso è misurabile, una linea sottile.

“Ogni singolo strato, ogni singolo colore è già un quadro, ma si procede comunque a sedimentare ed ogni tanto ci si ferma su di un colore. La scelta di interrompere proprio lì è relativa. Si tratta di un colore particolare, ma potenzialmente potrebbe essere un altro. Lo si lascia esistere lasciandogli quasi tutto lo spazio. Si prende congedo, ci si stacca, ci si sofferma, come una sospensione e si passa ad altro”.

L’esperienza del tempo – del proprio essere nel mondo – passa per il colore, che è gesto ed è anche corpo: per questo le tele usate dall’artista corrispondono a quattro misure soltanto: la mano, il volto, il busto, la figura intera – un altro autoritratto. Questi quadri, che dal 2003 fanno parte della pratica quotidiana dell’artista, si chiamano Sedimentazioni e affiancano sempre le esplorazioni condotte attraverso il colore su altri medium come la fotografia, la scultura, l’installazione. Un’altra superficie, una stecca di legno lunga un metro e alta dieci, è l’archivio di ogni Sedimentazione, conserva la traccia del processo temporale dello svolgimento di un quadro: tre mesi, cinque mesi, ne è il Diario.

Cecilia Canziani