Milan, at the Museo della Permanente the exhibition of Luisella Traversi Guerra

From April 2 to 24, 2022, the Museo della Permanente in Milan will host the solo exhibition of Luisella Traversi Guerra (Borgonovo Val Tidone, 1944) entitled The Ideal of Mastery. The exhibition, organized by Permanente and Skira editore, and curated and set up by COIMA Image - an architectural, interior design, space planning studio - presents more than 40 works that trace the artist’s most mature creative phase, characterized by an expressive code that revolves around nature and the melting pot of forms, lights and colors that it continually manages to generate and regenerate. Always at the center of Luisella Traversi Guerra’s interests, nature is the place where man feels his archaic belonging to the earth.

Moving from impressionist suggestions, from Vincent van Gogh to the beloved Georgia O’Keeffe, Luisella Traversi Guerra’s sign becomes more material, drawing on the great Lombard naturalistic tradition, that of Ennio Morlotti but also Piero Giunni and Ilario Rossi. This density determines a real revolution that is brought about by the painter’s imagery. Step by step, the floral veers toward the informal, the traces of figurative fade into the abstract, in an afflatus of spirituality. At the same time, the artist changes her modus operandi, moving from oil painting to tempera and finally to acrylic.

“I experimented a lot,” says Luisella Traversi Guerra, “and now I have more ability to manage densities, I can create lumps using the wooden stick to give the mosaic effect, or liquid and impalpable transparencies, almost spiritual. A real discovery was also the sponge that allows me to spread, remove, mediate, and then still act up to the ideal result. The Expressive Materials series is in fact a research into the possibilities of acrylics combined with other components, so as to give expression to a more consistent thickness of the pictorial work and satisfy a need for concreteness or low relief to the images.”

It is precisely the Expressive Materials cycle that turns out to be of fundamental importance in Luisella Traversi Guerra’s artistic itinerary, not only because of the new “material” centrality, but also because of the recurring presence of the figure of the circle that is found in her works such as Rosa Mistica of 2009.The “circle,” the “prayer” are two key words in her vocabulary, which should not be neglected in the least, but on the contrary welcomed in their mystical sense. The exhibition path proposes iconic works such as La vita è bella of 2015, Nel blu del mio cielo of 2018, Anthropocene of 2019 or again Pensiero nudo of 2015, an example of thespiritual abstractionism typical of the artist.

The title of the review, borrowed from the quote by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, one of the most influential Japanese writers, reasons about mastery as the apex of artistic expression that is achieved through a methodical and constant technical exercise. The same that Luisella Traversi Guerra pursues and that binds like a red thread her various creative seasons, in which painting is not seen as a mere profession, but as a vocation, necessary for one’s inner growth.

A Skira volume, with texts by Franco Marcoaldi and Chiara Gatti, accompanies the exhibition.

Luisella Traversi Guerra is a painter and writer. She spent part of her childhood in Paris. Back in Italy, for years she managed with dedication and enthusiasm the management and development of human resources in the family business; she specialized by gaining decades of experience in behavioral analysis and quality development in the work environment, becoming a speaker at conferences. She cultivates a passion for painting in her spare time, but more and more she realizes that her path of knowledge and growth is deeply intrinsic with artistic experience and particularly with the world of painting that belongs to her. Therefore, her painting becomes a means to externalize a deep inner quest through symbolic images and experimentation with different techniques. If her painting is a means of expressing the process that animates the artist’s inner life, her writing completes the expression, expanding the range of values and feelings revealed. Over the years he exhibits several times in the United States of America, China, Japan, Singapore, Holland, France, England, Germany, Monaco, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Hungary, Turkey, Korea and Belgium. Since 2004, the artist has also begun to offer his work in Italy.

For all information, you can visit the official website of the Museo della Permanente.

Image: Luisella Traversi Guerra, Lights from the Kaleidoscope (2019; mixed media on canvas, 180 x 200 cm)

Milan, at the Museo della Permanente the exhibition of Luisella Traversi Guerra

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