Susanna Viale...

painting is a kind of work loaded by humanity. I say human, because it is due to the artist subject’s predilection, which are busy in their daily duties. And it’s curious. Thanks to that kind of agreeably ingenuous and conquering curiosity, Susanna Viale raises the creative curtains towards a never-ending quest of new worlds, of new bizarre tales to narrate by realistic images. Her works never are short of man description, which celebrate him in different time of life. The human nature and its deeds become the undiscussed protagonists of Susanna Viale artistic creations. At a first sight, the very personal chromatic selection of gaudy colours give the sense as an impetuous whole but its apparently fortuitous juxtaposition makes unexpected balances. They are instinctive chromatic matching, which after become calibrated. Their chromatic as a whole fondles the visitor, it attracts his attention, and it captures the visitor until he participates to the depicted scenes. This is the inborn Susanna Viale talent: she approaches the exotic “alter mundus” to the western culture, in an unconscious way, I would say in a very natural way. The triptych representing the different moment of the treat of the rope, for example, become a life emblem, of which the Arianna’s thread constitutes the far archetype, the dance themes are allegories of a symbiotic sense of communion, the market becomes ideal intimist change theatre. It gains an explicit cooperation meaning. The solemn Lama image, in undefined space stability, like a prophetic apparition, acquires the valence as a precious amulet, like the two Tibetan monks praying image with its apotropaic meaning, a homage and invitation to the peace.

PAOLO RIZZI

To approach different cultures; to look at the behaviour of far people; to study and understand life-styles that we could consider primitive. This is the line guiding Susanna Viale, a painter from Turin with different interests. But it is not a simple curiosity in Oriental or African culture, as was the case with the artists of the past: it is a deep desire to know. Within European art this is not a new tendency. The German Expressionists, like Kirchner and Otto Müller, have painted „wild situations with fascinating anthropological implications. It is not by chance, that they were an inspiration for those German „Neue Wilden that are considered as one of the most interesting movement of the recent avant-garde in the latest years, but they are also near to some of our „trans avant-garde artists, like Cucchi and Paladino. Of course, it is not necessary to show off advances and provoking features: what is important is to enter into the spirit of a „primitive pureness, looking, for instance, at the masks of black Africa not with the rapacious hedonism of the occidental man, but with a spirit of authentic cultural symbiosis. Susanna Viale refuses ? and this is clear ? exhibitions or stylistic exaggerations. She wants to „see the African and Oriental differences first of all in the most suitable ethnological sphere, and then in relation with the values of painting. In this way, Polynesian or Caribbean ritual dances are saw and described as explosions of inner vitality, far from the consumerist and behavioural patterns of our technological world. It is not a chance that colours are vivid, even violent, painted with emotional participation and impetuous gesture. The same deformations in the physiognomy of the figures derive from expressive demands, not from folkloristic curiosity. And when the artist gets closer to define the personalities of the figures, an emotional and striking outburst of identification is enacted. We see the black boy in Burkina Faso concentrated in learning to read, or the mother that sweetly dandles his child. The landscape is African, the feeling universal. Also interesting, on the level of a transcendent spirituality, is the description of Tibetan monks: here it is the Tibetan Lama, dressed in red, entering in a blue atmosphere that, symbolically, alludes to the search of the cosmic mystery. In another painting the eyes of the monk stare at us, as if they wanted to impress on us an effort of sublimation of thought. What distinguishes Susanna Viale is the effort to abstract the particular from the universal. For this purpose she needs exotic persons and landscapes: they leave all the common cliché and materialistic conventions of our society. The expressiveness gets pure and painting acquires strength, a „biological truth that in the end upsets us. This research is important, even and above all in an artist that previously had different artistic experiences: the most authentic core of the soul emerges with a fascinating tension.