In the language of painting, which the twentieth century has handed down to us as a treasure store, it is not rare for neo-figuration and lyrical abstraction to meet up and dialogue within the space of the same canvas, the canvas needed for representation and a testimony of the support of the rhythm of the colour, of the deepest music, and the outpouring of song that the subject expresses. Such a dialogue can be clearly captured in this work by Pietra Barrasso. The reds and yellows that at times condense and stand out as material, vivid with flashes of light,flowing with linear fluxes, spirals, and vortexes like a river flooding the surface, and that never stops. Miraculously, however, they become forms, hinted-at appearance: a tree that an invincible aridity has made skeletal, a child cocooned in his own endless inhuman poverty, a bird of prey posed like a vulture allegorises death lying in wait, a racing car becomes a perch, the stolid and empty symbol of an obtuse West, of an uncivil forgotten civilisation that has egotistic and wasteful consumption as its god. Through minimal images and gleaming pulsations, representation here writes a story that tragically belongs to a history which continues to be unjust and that still concerns us in this millennium, but a history that does not hesitate to remove or bury under indifference. And, accompanied by the whites of ancient ethnic profiles, a though emerging from the painted wall, she tells us of the necessity to speak out, not to deflect from civil commitment or from collective conscience that has always been one of the basic reasons for art. Another of these reasons is to free the languages of the images from the grip of a communication that is only functional and exploitative, in the perspective of another reality, in view of a parallel world vibrant with pure energy and the utopia of colour. And the colour triumphs by flowing into the lyrical current of reds and yellows.
Marcello Carlino
