“The point exists in the absolute minimum”, writes the biophysicist and visual perception scholar Ruggero Pierantoni, speaking of the stars. Barbara Nejrotti's solo exhibition, curated by E. Tedeschi and held at the Punto Sull’Arte Gallery – Vernissage Saturday 12 May - is therefore a matter of points. The Turin artist sews her subjects with the precision of a needle. An infinitely small point next to another, and yet another, forms subjects that go to the roots of the ego and of human feeling. An amazing, innovative technique, with which Nejrotti portrays tiny people in laboured swimming amongst the waves, footprints sunk into the canvas upon which are deposited stylized vortexes and roots.
Works which are often monochromatic, in a rigourist synthesis which however surpasses abstract art. The pictures have, thanks to the technique and to the play on depths achieved though fabrics and cables, a physicality similar to that of bas-relief, the lights and shadows of which draw in the observer, almost as if they were sucked into the hollows and the concentric lines.
Nejrotti has developed an expressiveness of unique and contemporary elegance through a process of ennobling the technique, symbolically reflecting the industrial textile process, of artistic production that originates from the thousand-year old practice of sewing, augmenting its intrinsic and material value. The works trace the emptiness and the fullness of existence, the difficulty of life, the search for equilibrium and definition of the outlines of one’s being in life. A creative approach of conceptual matrices that leans toward the clarity of the lines and subjects to open up to the other: the artist seeks us, the complicity, the meeting with the observer.
“It is an artistic project that I've been working on for five years with the profound desire to give form to the feeling of being human - professes Nejrotti - The canvas is like one's own skin to which one clings amain, sometimes with the lightness of an embroidery, other times with the consuming pain of a suture”. The artist’s latest and most representative works will be exhibited in Sofia Macchi’s gallery Punto Sull’Arte in Varese until June 1st: “Nelle onde” (“In the Waves”), “In bilico” (“Hanging in the Balance”), “Orme” (Footprints”), “Puzzle”, “Essere Umano” (“Human being”), e “Radici” (Roots”).
Barbara Nejrotti: Born in Turin in 1971. She finds her expressive dimension by blending together different techniques from sewing to woodwork and from painting to sewing. Her artistic commitments begin in 2014 with the project "Between I and us towards Art". She participates in numerous solo exhibitions, collectives, and museum exhibitions. Recent expositions include exhibitions at the Museo della Scrittura and the Gallery A. Muse both in Turin in 2016; she exhibits at the European Parliament in Brussels and at the Polo Museale dell’800 in Turin in 2017; in 2018 she realises a solo exhibition at Chagall House in Israel and participates in the International Biennial of Contemporary sacred Art of humanity's religions in Palermo. She is amongst the finalists of the Meneghetti International Art Prize 2018. She lives and works in Turin.