IVA LULASHI
The starting point of Iva Lulashi’s painting is frequently a video frame. The artists, after completing a web search with some of the words she loves to investigate, chooses an image she feels suitable to set in motion a pictorial process. The frame functions as a spiral on reality and. precisely because of its vagueness and even its ambiguity, it leaves an open space on which the painting can act. It is a method to which the artist adheres very consistently and it is at the root of the work, Sweet flagrum, which she has created especially for Libere tutte. It is a considerably larger oil painting than usual for Lulashi, as is suggested by the other two paintings exhibited. The woman’s body, swallowed up by an apparently voracious nature, is a work of great quality and pictorial intensity, in which the paint is spread like a stain to provide a dramatic tension intrinsic to the technical process. The work thus expresses a double, contrasting, drive. On the one hand, it maintains a sense of distance, physical and temporal, provided by the muted tone of the painting. On the other hand, it expresses a dimension of imminence, of urgency that reflects the situations examined. Even the female figure of Sweet flagrum is subjected to this double tension which pushes her from the surrounding tangle of vegetation and bounces her to the surface of the canvas. The space freed by the vagueness of the frame thereby becomes a field in which painting can operate, extending immeasurably the spectrum of ambiguity.
