Art reviews

.... Elisa prefers the pictorial technique of sanguine, whose vibrant signs support the vocation to represent figures still involved in the secret of being, figures of children and teenagers, or the faces of adults who secretly seem to still participate. The techniques of the "atmospheric sign" and the "cross sign" give the appearance of the psychological ghost without thereby losing the clarity of the image, which vibrates – as Kandisnsky said – “like a well-played violin”.
Clarity, transparency, luminous dust beating the bottom: these are the elements that determine the quiet thickness of soul in Elisa’s more intense works, where the figure, thanks to the frequent use of blood, sometimes combined with white lead and charcoal, does not receive the physical thickness of shadow, which is absent, takes on an atmospheric character without the influencing integration of external elements air.
In her best works featuring children and teenagers the transparency of soul does not have to intended in a psychological sense but rather as a simple and immediate anxiety of being....

Pietro Bonfiglioli

....The “figures”, in a pictorical way, are quite different from reality and other than photography.
Elisa invents her own reality, led by autonomous forms and free laws: nature and emotion must be customized by the mind, the arbiter of painting....
The picture becomes more and more an intellectual fact. The somatic features on the canvas must uphold the intimate, secret and mysterious truth of the character’s personality. The portrait has a physiognomic meaning, but the meaning comes up from the supposed and stalked inner being, obstinately, as did Proust with his literary characters....

Luigi Serravalli

... We often heard to say that every artist’s atelier is inside his soul. Elisa’s soul seems to be woven together with the luminosity of a place which is in direct contact with air.
Her atelier is not far away from the Two Towers, right behind of an ancient and mighty palace, seeming not to care much about what surrounds it. The alleys all around are like veins merging all the humours from the suburbs to the very heart of the historical centre of Bologna, Italy. In this place made of red living bricks, this painter fixes her life’s moments on pieces of paper and canvass, trying her best in other arts as well, such as music and poetry, while creating a dialogue with notes often foreseeing movements of the visual language.
“ La musique est comme la peintre ”, Music is like a painter, said Francis Picabia, this is why in the atelier the chromatic resonances gather and melt with the notes of a piano and of other instruments the painter chooses as he goes along with her next painting.
Elisa’s style is sometimes represented by musical instruments, as for Domenichino, a sublime maestro, whose shapes evoked resonances invading huge marine views, dilating until the horizon.
All the works hanging on her wall beat the time: each portrait, each face represent a moment of her life, glance reminds a person.
Elisa has been reading life through the glances of the people. She sees through glances as if they were pieces of filigree, interpreting them to highlight their emotions and frames of mind.
Some portraits were invented, as for the protagonists of a book she had read. As in a dream, in a dimension where “ time has stopped ”, colours are intelligently softened, lines are clearly defined, traced in an elegant way, therefore creating facial features and frames of mind.
*Mondino de’ Liuzzi, famous anatomist, who lived in Bologna at the beginning of the 14th century, Adia, his lover, Mrs **Clarissa Dalloway and many other people, in the silence surrounding the atelier, gathering their voices with the phonetic-musical language of the “ Canti Orfici” by Dino Campana, together with the musical instruments, the resonance of the shells and the waves. They remind us that every note is an instant. Every touch of colour is an instant. And... and instant can contain the sense of a lifetime...

Franco Basile