"Art, today perhaps more than ever, is a rhizomatic path, often elliptical in the dynamics of the figurable. It arises from other art and often the links with nature are lost. Complicating the issue here is also the theme of the exhibition: the night, therefore, romantically, darkness and mystery. Stefania Orrù and Cetty Previtera reconnect with nature through a practice that has its roots in a painting of matter, whose stratifications on the one hand lose the relationship with the visible and on the other reinvent it through a dense fabric of colors and iridescences. One can also think of the skies of Anselm Kiefer. The title, chosen by Peppe Cona for this exhibition in the spaces of Scalamatrice 33, is taken from a book by Claudio Marucchi. For their "hymn with half-closed eyes", thus continues the same title of the cited book, Cetty and Stefania use different pictorial techniques: mainly Cetty oil, Orrù lands and oxides, on a base of scagliola and marble dust. An organic and dust-proof nature is sung softly in Stefania's works,

"The hidden garden" and "The flowers and the night" seem to me to be two exemplary paintings, where the quality of the color feeds on an alchemical dimension. In "The tightrope walker" we see a red glow, perhaps a figurine on an immense cliff. "Like the stars", "In the blue", "The garden of the night", the diptych "Purple landscape" immerse themselves in a panic, ancestral atmosphere, while the geometries of the small "The measure of the dark" try to organize the organic fluidity in an abstract mental order, as well as the centrality of the sphere in "Like the moon", albeit with semblances of a sky contemplated through fairy twigs. A party of dance colors in Cetty's "Dream up, wake up", colors that return with different geometries and responses in "Little night", to trace balances as floating in the rough sea of the chromatic drafts, while the night theme is more openly addressed in "The night belong to lovers", where the natural element and the human element intertwine, or in the great "The black one", in "Night night", "The other night". Paintings that confirm a line of research that moves steps by the example of Franco Sarnari and Piero Zuccaro, anchored to these "decomposed landscapes" now characteristic of the work of Cetty Previtera. In the small "Winter, night" landscape elements are more clearly delineated, a pale and bare trunk, slender, house roofs, tree shadows. Nature is presented in a magical, musical dimension, as in a mosaic, where each color resonates with echoes and tints of the music box of life."

"There are artists who tell stories: skillful narrators capable of hypnotizing us, offering us reality through their painted or sculpted words. There are artists who – obsessively – choose to reveal themselves, with an absolute need for self-reference which seems to scream out to the world: “Love me!”. And then there are artists who use themselves and their tiring personal everyday experience of life to tell us about the world and, somehow, about ourselves. Stefania Orrù belongs to the third category. Her story unfolds clearly, resplendent and yet complex, tiring, suffered, work by work, portrait by portrait. Clearly – because it enters us immediately, at first glance: it hypnotizes us and accompanies us inside our awareness. We read a sense of absoluteness and of truth that leaves us happy and amazed.

Suffered – because once it has inexorably involved us, we realize that the reading is anything but simple. As if we were to relive, in using it and making it our own, the long and complex process that the artist has experienced in creating it. As if a transference comparable to that created in a psychoanalytical relationship were to be formed between her and us. Stefania Orrù is an intense woman and artist. Attractive, with soft, even features, characterized by an ancient, primordial wisdom. It is true that she made independent decisions very early on in life. It is true that she decided to take charge of her life and follow her dreams when she was little more than a girl, but her approach to the world is, nevertheless, disarming. Even before we come to the “hot” matter of her work, we sense that we are entering a dense and complex terrain. Used to spending long periods of time on her own, she has matured a view of reality which is both detached and extremely deep; never cynical, attentive and loving, capable of surprising and of holding judgement – waiting to understand – as befits men and women of wisdom. She is the elder sister you would like to have by your side, yet at the same time, you feel like you want to protect her against the pitfalls of a life too chaotic and dirty for a soul as bright as hers. Bright is the perfect word. It brings us to touch the heart of her work. Which is not “work” as we usually mean it when talking about the path of an artist, made up of series, evolutions, key moments, rethinks, stoppages and sudden solutions. Obviously, all of this has taken place in Stefania Orrù’s story, but what we read, sharp and implacable, above and beyond everything else, is a journey. Stefania set out on this journey when, for the first time, she began handling art, when she encountered the physical joy of rough materials and plaster, which she has never put aside, having set herself a precise target: the truth. A spiritual journey, even before becoming artistic. An essential inner need which she has succeeded in transforming into something to sha- re with the world. And for us too, this sharing is a spiritual and emotional experience before anything else. The first time I actually saw Stefania’s works close up, I had yet to meet her. The photographs I had already seen had aroused my curiosity, but despite being the most excellent shots, I hadn’t the faintest idea of how much explosive power those faces would transmit when seen live. I had also read about her and was fascinated by her story, but nothing had prepared me for what I would feel. A personal show of her works was being held at the “Opera del Duomo” Museum in Prato and her faces opened up suddenly, assertively and absolutely under the frescoed ceilings. There was no end to the mystical poetry of those places. The rough, cracked and rugged matter from which the faces emerged in a triumph of light see- med to be made of the same stone from which the images of saints and the Madonna looked out. The face whose hair stood up in the wind like a flame was that of a timeless young girl, perhaps a playmate of those who had walked through those rooms while they were being frescoed. At that time I knew nothing about these works, yet their immediate intensity struck my heart. They looked into my eyes, seeking me out, and what they sent me was a message of luminous serenity; souls speaking to my own. Then I met Stefania, and what had been little more than a sensation became a certainty: all those faces, all those profiles, all those eyes that stared into mine and even those that shyly lowered their lids, were Her. She was her own muse, her own privileged territory of analysis. She needed nothing else: she had taken the face she knew better than any other and that was easiest to reach–herown–andhadmadeither way of telling the story of the world. Hers and that of the others. It is quite common for artists – particularly women – to choose self-portraits as their medium of expression. Women come from thousands of years of segregation, from roles in which they have taken care of others and from solitude. Men have been associated with war and social affairs, and women with the family. The decades – because this is what we are talking about – of self-awareness that are behind women are still not enough to make them look explicitly outwards. Naturally there is more than just this. Women “are” inside: mother and womb, and with this womb they communicate much more deeply than with words. But usually, when female artists tell their story through self-portraits, they do so by structuring emotional stories, narrating their frustrations and their joys, their insecurities and their triumphs, their bodies, love, eroticism, suffering and sickness. Conversely, Stefania Orrù’s “self-portraits” (and in this case inverted commas are mandatory, because they cannot really be defined as such) are actually a totally original species. That face and then that body are shape: a pretext for talking about man as a human being, as mankind. The story she tells us is very similar, in lots of ways, to myth, because it is a primordial story of order and chaos, a story of creation and birth. A coming into the world – or, as specifically befits this case – a coming into the light, slow and suffered, like the labour before giving birth. And the hard, rough, dusty material chosen by Stefania, so paradoxically in contrast with all that resplendent light, is inseparable from the message it offers us. It is a perfect synthesis between ancient and modern techniques, her own, which at first glance makes us think of the rough and stony consistency of a fresco. Canvas lain on a board, spread with a mixture of scagliola and marble dust, in finer and finer layers, already knowing what the base structure of the painting will be and proceeding accordingly to build up areas of light and shade, blurring contours, creating mists, scratches and cracks. And then again, finishing off with a brush, a spatula or a blade. A long job which requires an almost endless series of steps, alternating with long pauses, with works proceeding alongside each other and then stopping, together with the artists, like serious and curious guests. “When I am in my studio, with my works in progress all around me, I feel like they are looking at me”, says the artist. And it is a feeling that the spectator understands immediately, because that material in which flashes of light and depths of darkness swirl is alive and mobile, and it draws you in. It is a material that never forgives. And while Stefania’s journey continues inexorably towards the truth, the subjects of her works very slowly experience a change. If they were once mostly evocative and assertive close-ups, like icons, where sha- pe was formed by clots of material which lost its contours, the works on show today represent a new stretch of road. In a slow, age-old movement, like the shifting continents, light and darkness begin to separate. They are two antithetic principles, affirmation and negation, not necessarily good and evil: this is not the message that the artist wants to send us, but for there to be birth, there has to be distinction, separation. Hence the light is condensed into an increasingly clear and legible form, while darkness thickens all around, deep and unfathomable, like never before. The powder that surrounds the faces and bodies like the tail of a comet suggests movement, the unstoppable thrust towards a purpose, energy restrained for so long which is exploding in that very moment. The compositional approach surprises us with its originality, with the figures that seem to flutter in flight, upheld and carried by that energy. Sometimes they are warrior angels, or female pagan saints, wrapped in drapes that imprison them, but only just for a moment, because the gesture is one of liberation, and it is so evident that you almost want to reach out your hand and take those bandages apart to speed up the process. Around the body – with its soft round shoulder and pale back – the dust looks like a flame, as though the contours were burning with incandescent light, and in that mysterious trail we sense how much our every action, even our every thought, is inextricably linked to everything around us. There is no interruption between the body and the material that has generated it, in the same way that there is no interruption between us and others, the world, nature, the sky, God. More defined than the close ups that date a little further back, these figures are characterized by facial details. They look like full, tangible volumes, while the fabric – pale, sparkling light like a blanket of snow – comes together in close, soft folds which design the body. Yet unlike the faces that come before them, it seems that it would take nothing to take them apart, as though the mere extension of a hand would enable us to lose them once more in the darkness from which they come. The fascination is complete. The feeling that this being, this entity of beautiful female forms which represents us all, has come into the world, is evident in the works in which the background begins to take shape. There seems to be an albeit vague di- vision between earth and sky. Like in creation. The figure no longer seems to flutter in emptiness, but rests on the ground, or even lies down. It doesn’t sleep, but nor is it awake: it is in this intermediate phase that precedes being. This is, perhaps, the birth of the soul, which thus appears naked and defenceless, while the fabric that enveloped it before, imprisoning it, is slowly falling loose, disintegrating in the darkness, abandoned prison or placenta. Or the figure is standing straight, its back toward us. As though it had already begun to walk away. Its feet planted solidly on the ground. Birth, we said, is complete. And we sense this completeness, this solar awareness, in the large face that Stefania Orrù offers us. A face that is close, in terms of iconography, to the works of the previous series, but that differentiates itself through a completeness which could not be achieved before. The face is no longer an aggregation of luminous material in opposition to darkness, but is light alone, pure light. The light now comes from within. It is the light of wisdom and of awareness, achieved via a tiring, yet wonderful and essential path. It is the truth. Stefania has reached it and painted it. For us."

"The theme of Being, which has always been at the centre of Stefania Orrù’s research, is investigated through a hermetic painting that encloses distinct sentimental urgencies. This is not a merely eye-catching surface lyricism, but rather a sort of reflection that knows how to linger in the passing between light and shade, returning to the realm of the senses with a serene spirit. It is a meditative immersion into light, colour and form through a powerful painting imbued with energy.

Stefania Orrù is an artist who interprets the contemporary world through her authentic, existential and poetic world, without losing her true nature: withher, concept becomes material and the works withhold and send out the light of the idea. In her works there is a deep echo of experienced aesthetics that even undo and therefore suspend the idea of time, overlapping past and present. When observing these works, we realise that we are inside a story that talks about Stefania Orrù and simultaneously links us to a universe of references brought to mind by an image. At first glance it may seem that these images of women (which are almost always self-portraits) are, above all, the carriers of a mystical beauty based on the balance of the composition and the delicate dosage of the coloristic element. Recalling the Greek tradition, we could speak of a beauty which is not symmetría alone, but also chróma, colour. Therefore, a qualitative and punctual beauty, which may become manifest even in a simple chromatic sensation or a flash of light: “The simple beauty of a colour is given by a form that dominates the darkness of material, by the presence of an incorporeal light, which is nothing but reason and idea,” according to Plotinus’ way of thinking, and which becomes, within the frame of Neoplatonic philosophy, the light that shines on the material as a reflection of the One from whom it emanates. But here we are not within a last expression of the mysticism of light, but rather within an aesthetics of light that makes Beauty (and evocative capacity) a cognitive tool. And Beauty, in order to be a cognitive tool, needs to be filtered by literature that, despite the large variety of accents, dwells on the aesthetics of light: literary echoes thus intertwine and succeed one another, from Dante, to Blake and Rimbaud, from Leopardi, to Neruda and Pasolini. Her poetic universe is expressed, incisively, by bringing ancestral icons to mind: suspended, straight on female figures, placed within a space which is annulled, a dispersing vacuum, in which all that remains visible is the figure, the only real space that can be probed. The limpid classicism of the subjects, figures, rarefied faces and profiles, the attention to the body that underlies respect and consideration for the individual that stands out in an immaterial space made palpable by transparencies and textural depths : the faces that, at first glance, recalled the fixity of Byzantine icons, dissolve to show the ephemeral depth of the sensations, emotions, feelings and consciences manifested through painting. The measured and precise balance of the compositions also relies on the shade that blends with and opposes a light created from the diaphanous, which rises from the depth of things and expresses their infinite power. Phenomenal reality is always partly obscure and undecipherable, and thus destined to inevitably blend shade and light, interior light, the internal and invisible core of things, eidos – the essence through which the Being manifests itself. Hence the need to investigate, to dig with the aim of directing reflection, lingering and understanding. What we are participating in is an aesthetic research that returns to symbolism and figuration, to explore the invisible and eternal. And the notion of time in these works also passes through a clever technique that breathes the scent of the past: old and new at once, blending tradition and innovation, springing from experience acquired over the years, practice with Master Elvio Marchionni, and reflections on gestures and material. Artistic language becomes concrete by anchoring to individual experience, and it is not surprising to find in Orrù an evident love for memory and history (the lesson of the painters of the Umbrian Quattrocento mediated by the Master), and for the processing of the material, learned also through the use of the strappo technique, and the work on masonry surfaces, in addition to the comparison with the natural colours and atmospheres of her homeland, the Marches, and with Umbria, experienced during the years of training as an artist. The same colours found in the velvety graduation of the shades, from pale pink to blue, light ochre yellow and pearl white, which characterise her palette and take on unexpected hues due to the strong surge of the soul that enlivens them. Effects made possible by an elaborate experimentation matured through the choice of a mixed technique that unites fresco, tempera grassa and hot wax to create otherwise impossible overlays and veilings. Shading off softens the passage from light to shade, and the lack of sharpness of the contours becomes imperceptible dispersion but, for Stefania Orrù, it is also the awareness to be handling a material that is alive and vital, and that undergoes changes owing to the way she handles it. The shadings off are not only soft and delicate, but create a contrast that no longer speaks of the sweetness of remembering and of memories, but of a different place where thoughts gather and consolidate in a closely elaborate material, according to a precise and meditated expressive ductus, which changes depending on the pursued results, making the surface at times dense and scratched, and at times glossy and smooth."

"To find you in front of Stefania’s paintings seems like a passage of season, when Nature vibrates attending to its own rebirth or apparent death. The usual path of contemplation in front of a painting: watching, thinking, feeling, with Stefania’s paintings and drawing extend the contemplation to the whole body of the observer and the perception of her exclusive way of representing the world grows as if the image of the painting would be the proposal of a renewed Soul, capable of invading every inch of the body of the watcher.

To find you in front of Stefania’s paintings seems like a passage of season, when Nature vibrates attending to its own rebirth or apparent death. The usual path of contemplation in front of a painting: watching, thinking, feeling, with Stefania’s paintings and drawing extend the contemplation to the whole body of the observer and the perception of her exclusive way of representing the world grows as if the image of the painting would be the proposal of a renewed Soul, capable of invading every inch of the body of the watcher. Always and only through faces and bodies delicately painted, from soul to soul, when one looks at this motionless, but not still, dynamics, when he perceives this astonished and alive stillness, the slow parade of these paintings enters in memory as a multitude of people on their way to look for a lost identity. You feel like touching them, or at least grazing them, this faces that seem to challenge the mystery of life. You want to go close to the pulsating lips of her women to feel the soft blow of their breath. There’s nothing imploring on their look, full of dignity, of a face thousand times represented on Stefania’s paintings, maybe her own face, but the denounce of the right to ask and know, in every way, and through every expressive tool, what hides behind the enigma of existence. The narrative style of a first expressive stage of this rare painter is about to reach its highest level, the ability to “narrate” a face and not only to represent it, almost reaching an impossible result: a painting that appears different every time we look at it and at the same time the certain feeling, even after many meetings, to see it for the first time. So, when your look leaves one of her paintings, grows a natural desire of a new meeting, like it happens with the mystery of art and also, as immortal literature says, with a great sentiment of love."

"It is perhaps a child's game Stefania Orrù’s way of doing, perhaps it’s a game also the instinct I get to touch her works made of solid matter, sometimes sculptures. It is certainly a desire of the profound self, to 'taste' the work with your fingertips, if not even embracing it to feel all its rough and primitive details. This is because the synthesis that the author has reached, in her research, first of all is dialoguing with our body, narrating our anthropological evolution. The matter that become body and sign, with the patient work of Stefania Orrù, are the essential elements of the mixture, with which the living being has become a thinking being, other than the original Nature. The lumps of that primordial mush, loved by the author's hands, become the foundation of the first human ambitions. The folds and furrows, amidst the boiling of the material, are the emergence of the project, a sign and design of autonomy. Only then comes the kiss of color, perspective puncture and pictorial warmth, essential to date this artistic action as contemporary.

"Stefania Orrù has a history of artisan knowledge and artistic experiences, nourished by a deep personal sensitivity, which allow her an enviable freedom in research. This is how the charm of the fresco, the patience of the “bottega” work, the introspective painting, the languages of sculpture and architecture, and even the contemporary informal are fragments of each of her work. The fascination of a subject, as perhaps dominated the first paintings, yields to the desire to build, to model without a specific objective. This is probably the journey that Stefania embarked on a few years ago, when she chose to follow her own manual skills and her own 'sense of pictorial orientation', without expecting a precise result from the work. It has expanded the linguistic vision to other possible intersections, exchanges, charms. At the same time her own visual dictionary emerged in synthesis, in furrows and clots, then in points of light and color. This process of synthesis, through the emergence of the material from the background, starts from an elementary pictorial project, a construct of lines and boxes, of colored geometries, of empty-fullness. There at the bottom you can trace the origin of the subject, which, as in a reverse erosion process, is covered with debris, then modeled, partly recognized and partly canceled. The identity of this language is the morphology of the added material, which takes the form of the original subject while the author destroys it, covers it, alienating its distinctive characteristics. The translation process is therefore fundamental, in this 'transformative-manipulation' it creates an epidermal perspective and a synthesis of identity. A real language of transfiguration, not scientific but empirical, not narrative but emotional, complex and essential at the same time, as some languages of primitive art appear today, made up of elementary signs, calcareous shades and material empathies. I think of the emotion that the surfaces of these works emanate, as of the feeling of estrangement I feel when I lean my back against a column in a temple, when I lose the completeness of the overall architectural scene, and as I approach I feel I am dominated, until to be swallowed up in the belly of the giant. Only the smooth roughness of the column and the perception of the immensity of the fragment, with which I enter into a relationship, gives me a balance with the creation, partial and autonomous at the same time. This is what comes to mind when I see Stefania Orrù's works, the autonomy of a fragment, the essentiality of a sign, the new relationship with the whole. Stefania Orrù's works therefore have a linguistic relevance under various aspects, a primitive beauty, a reserved planning, a profound architectural plot and, finally, they are a sensitive synthesis of the history of painting. The work of subtracting the excess material that gives shape to the architectural project is a primitive and therefore essential heritage. Proceeding with expert manual skill is reserved planning, which fills everything with ancient wisdom. The link between the craftsmanship of the workshop and the inner feeling of the informal painting is an architectural plot. All together, these aspects narrate a journey through the history of painting, ranging from primitive art to conceptual art. A backward journey, in which the author identifies the colored geometric signs of the subject, and then builds it with the mixture of marble but then digs furrows and erodes the material itself. A journey that finally ends in the marriage with painting, in which the kiss of natural pigments, in passionate patches of Byzantine and Giotto tones, sanctions the sublimation of engineering into emotion. It is always a great responsibility to talk about a work, inside which the author has put all of himself, with his own reasons and emotions, which often influence his own clarity of judgment. In these works the emotion transferred by the author is great, and she is profoundly respectful of the laws of Nature. It is a humble emotion like that of someone who investigates for love, not for justice. It is a wise emotion that contemplates the failure and erosion of time. It is still a refined emotion, because it is rich in experiences and meditation. In the works of Stefania Orrù these emotions come together in their own rule, of consistency and rigor towards a high sense of painting. These emotions that boost research and the rule that guarantees pictorial authenticity are a combination of rare pictorial strength, in the research and solidity of each work. They are also a new linguistic relationship, which I would define between history and dream. I would say that Stefania Orrù dances a tango with her works, where passion is mixed with passion and thorns, a rare blend of history and dream. Few relationships are more lyrical in an opera."