LINEAR ALCHEMIES

by Azzurra Immediato

The lens of Rossella Pezzino de Geronimo works within the boundaries of pars construens and pars destruens. The artist’s research investigates Nature through a study of Matter, Time and Space, resulting in a new and personal objectivity. The process of decontextualising and fragmenting images creates abstract geometrics, finding a new identity from their natural origin, when crystallized by photography.
With the name Linear Alchemies, the artist instinctively leads the viewer along the path of her interpretation. Her art plays by translating a surrealist painting into photography, capturing Nature, crystallising its perpetual evolution, and relativising its atavistic components. Rossella examines Space, Nature, Matter and all-changing Time, creating linear alchemies resulting in the artist’s epiphanic leitmotif, i.e. the intrinsic, recondite and intimate concept of vision and chance, the here and now. Her lines, intended as a new formal language tending towards abstractism, and capable of veering towards a new order of composition, represent a conceptual emblem designed to clarify and translate the project idea through the subsequent process of visual scanning. Her continuous poetic journey comes to life through an interior technical evolution that seems to follow the morphology of the earth and of Nature in the remotest corners of the world that Rossella loves to explore. No stone is left unturned, and wherever she goes, she gleans secrets that she recounts in the form of memories. Hers is a journey in search of her ancestral roots and our consciousness, substantiated, in this case, by cognitive abstractions that push beyond clearly defined boundaries. The shapes, which seem traced with charcoal on white canvas, are instead a purge, a monochrome photographic synthesis that unexpectedly adds to rather than subtracting from Rossella’s concurrent colour images. Indeed, the variety resulting from this dual position reveals the unique value of a deep desire – that of being part of Nature. It is through such alchemic composition that the artist penetrates the folds of the soul. The morphology created by pixels, the work of Chance on earth, is so extraordinary as to make it a unique, self-referential subject. The viewer is not faced with landscape scenes in the traditional sense, but rather with crystallized suspensions generated by translating images into signs, tangible and abstract ones. While maturing and evolving her style of expression, Rossella perseveres in a continuous search for the innermost essence, hidden by the weaves of creation. Her images are like ontological incarnations of oniric observations and translations; Rossella is relentless in her search for the most profound essence and soul of Nature, a search that takes her to the ends of the earth. This too is part of her alchemies: the demarcation of places and non-places, in which the identity of both dissolve, amidst the shadows and lights of white and black. The places depicted in these pictures are neither recognizable nor traceable to images we all known; instead, it is a compendium of sensations captured in a click, of landscapes generated by glancing into the soul of the earth. The difficulties that Rossella faces in her travels add an enriching touch to her work; they offer land, sand, water, in search of a new status, a radical personality that does not seek the mimicry of objective fact, but rather, a subjectivity that, although descriptive, follows the rules of abstract painting, deconstructing images in favour of emotion and interpretative sensuality.
This epiphanic and ontological journey to the corners of the Earth is accomplished by capturing the Linear Alchemies. Beyond form, Rossella gives a disarming beauty of composition, recalling the miracle of Nature, interpreted by an intimate and universal synaesthesia.