Materiale d'archivio su Giosetta Fioroni by Archivio Bioiconografico della Galleria NazionaleLa Galleria Nazionale
These paintings that I exhibit are meant to be illustrative and, so to speak, didactic. They arise from an idea that is not “neofigurative”, but “figurative” tout court of a visit I made not only inside myself, but inside myself after the daily visit of the society in which I live.
Materiale d'archivio su Giosetta Fioroni by Archivio Bioiconografico della Galleria NazionaleLa Galleria Nazionale
The aspect of this society in its complex merging of contradictions, of internal boiling, of deep and surface conflicts (which today more than take ever a political shape), of doubtful grafts between authentic and inauthentic, of lies, of real pain, finally of man’s angry consumption has produced and produces within me (figuratively, of course) a feeling of emptiness and fear at the same time.
As if to say a “frightened” projection of images that do not escape the funeral, the devoted and loving and even the tender funeral of violence.
Materiale d'archivio su Giosetta Fioroni by Archivio Bioiconografico della Galleria NazionaleLa Galleria Nazionale
The departure to the interior visit were some images of the first years of fascism.
The (figurative) coincidence with the external visit in our society are faces, clothes and fashions and above all feelings that roam, often ghosts of the consumption, of the funeral remake around us.
Because I said from the beginning that the paintings that I exhibit want to be in some way illustrative and didactic, it seems right to clarify that illustration and pedagogy are in my work, indeed in the feeling of my work today, in this particular moment, elements that enlighten the “sleep of reason”, “teaching subjects” in a new, hypothetical but not necessarily utopian search for popular figurative expression.
Giosetta Fioroni
Elsa Martinelli (1966) by Giosetta FioroniLa Galleria Nazionale
Giosetta Fioroni
(Rome, 1932)
The only female artist of Scuola di Piazza del Popolo, in 1964 Giosetta Fioroni participated in the Venice Biennale, in the edition that saw the triumph of Pop Art.
Here she presented the “silver paintings”, in which she created with silver-colored enamel female figures drawn from magazines and advertisements that are projected onto the canvas and then painted, like contemporary icons, suspended in a timeless dimension.
Besides the anonymous faces of mass society, there is also a study on the history of art, with the appropriation of iconographies taken from the great masterpieces of the Italian pictorial tradition, appearing in paintings of 1965 and 1966, such as Da Botticelli and Nascita di una Venere Op.
A seduction for a cinematic temporality can be identified in Fioroni’s pictorial practice, as in Ragazza TV, a cycle that represents the same female subject arranged in sequence in the exhibition space.
This attraction also led the artist to experiment with the cinematographic medium in a series of experimental films, including La solitudine femminile (1967, 8mm, b/w, 8').
La solitudine femminile (1967) by Giosetta FioroniLa Galleria Nazionale
Poetess Rosanna Tofanelli Guerrini starred in the movie, creating a reflection on the woman and the female identity portrayed in her intimacy, which contrasts with the stereotypical external image conveyed by advertising.
The theme of the gaze is central in the dynamics that are established between looking and being looked at, between reality and representation.
La solitudine femminile (1967) by Giosetta FioroniLa Galleria Nazionale
This reflection also emerges in the famous installation Spia ottica presented in 1968 at Teatro delle mostre: Fioroni sets up her bedroom in the gallery, where the actress Giuliana Calandra performs daily gestures.
Upon entering the exhibition space, the visitor is thus induced to spy, like a voyeur, at what is happening inside, through a keyhole and through an overturned binocular lens.
La solitudine femminile (1967) by Giosetta FioroniLa Galleria Nazionale
In the dynamic that is established between the creative act and the observer “are two moments that merge into one.
The experience of the beholder and the behavior of the woman who knows she is being watched. An image framed by the lens that makes it smaller, distances and memorizes the action”.
La solitudine femminile (1967) by Giosetta FioroniLa Galleria Nazionale
While not assuming militant positions, since the 1960s Fioroni has been focusing attention on the condition of women, addressing political issues from a personal and autobiographical perspective, which imply a reflection on the authenticity of the image.
Materiale d'archivio su Giosetta Fioroni by Archivio Bioiconografico della Galleria NazionaleLa Galleria Nazionale
As she herself observed: “In those years of feminism, I was increasingly interested in the feminine, in the feelings that these women expressed in the look, in the movement of a hand, in the attitude of the figure”.
Lara Conte
Giosetta Fioroni and Lara Conte
Works cited:
G. Celant, Giosetta Fioroni, Skira Editore, Milano 2009, p. 166.
G. Fioroni, in M. Mussio (a cura di), Giosetta Fioroni, La Nuova Foglio Editrice, Macerata 1976, p. 43.
