OPR Gallery

Viale Corsica, 99
20133 Milano, Italy

MON CLOSED
TUE – SUN 2:30 P.M. / 7 P.M.

ARTISTS:
Marta Roberti Sandro Chia (Collezione Ramo)

Marta Roberti answers questions from
Irina Zucca Alessandrelli, curator of the Collezione Ramo

Give a definition of what drawing is for you.

Drawing is the way in which through the hand vision becomes image. An image is a provisional solution to a vision coming into consciousness.

What is your relationship with drawing? And with the history of Italian art of the last century?

Drawing is my main form of life and therefore it is complex to answer this question. I started drawing like everyone else as a child and never stopped. While I was in graduate school in philosophy, I took courses in life drawing nudes, and I liked to draw portraits, but I never took myself seriously; drawing was a pleasure that I did not relate back to an artistic ambition, because I wanted to be a writer.

Then in my twenties an important meeting with a German artist peer diverted me into the creation of visual images, and from that moment I have done nothing but seek in drawing a mode of writing. My drawing can be understood as writing both in the formal sense, because the repeated strokes refer to linguistic signs, but also in the content of my works, in which nature is not represented but representative of a creative dynamic, the same one that, as an artist, characterizes me. The signs I produce through the movement of my hand are generated naturally and prolifically like vegetation that multiplies itself into leaves, flowers, branches and roots.

In Italian art of the last century, I like to trace Etruscan echoes and mythical themes. I love De Chirico’s Metaphysics and Savinio’s interpenetration between the human and other animals. I am strongly attracted to Marino Marini’s horse sculptures and feel a powerful attraction to Francesco Clemente’s images.

Why did you choose this work from Collezione Ramo?

This work by Chia, while browsing through the innumerable works in the Collezione Ramo, was an unexpected apparition: it immediately sent me back to the image of a small bronze from Luristan that had struck me in an inexplicable way long ago and kept replaying itself to my consciousness. I had never been able to reframe it, despite several attempts. The bronzetto had appeared to me while exploring prehistoric images in a textbook: it depicts an animal that could be either a horse or a large dog, with its legs resting on the shoulders of a frontal female figure. Chia’s drawing also depicts an animal that looks like a horse and rests its legs on the shoulders of a male figure. I wonder if Chia also saw that bronze and could not help but rework it. My choice could only go to this drawing, putting myself back into the game again with this image that not only reminds me of the Luristan bronzeetto but also opens up countless other connections, both with the rest of Chia’s work and with much art history, as well as, above all, with the current trajectory of my work in which I explore the human-animal relationship and their mutual metamorphosis.