Maria Tarditi’s Art Workshop Milan is a cosmopolitan city; countless artists live here and in every district you will find studios, workshops, converted lofts, and other places where culture and creativity meet together with their knowledge and skills. As you leave Piazzale Loreto and take Via Padova, right at the beginning of this street, inside a built-up area which could be described as a fairy-tale place (or rather a place of bygone times), you will find in the patio which opens out as soon as you walk through the main gate of number twenty-six a workshop which has been given the name “Immagine”. This is a place that will take you back in time, years and years back, since all you will see here springs from a desire to renew a traditional artistic, manual and artisan research, which we feel we need to regain in this new millennium. Unique articles, created by the miraculous hands of Maria Tarditi, a young and very sensitive woman and artist.
Lamps, cards, boxes and all sorts of containers, coated pencils, larger and smaller writing pads, made of more or less valuable paper, handbags, and little parcel-boxes: all entirely handmade; and also photograph holders in various styles and sizes and countless types of beautifully crafted giftware. The visitor’s eye will not fail to stop and look at a rich bookplate department, also including engravings by various artists who cooperate with this workshop. Right next to it are the studios of other two artists, Marisa Settembrini and Fiorella Jori. Maria Tarditi is busy preparing extremely original tablets and art editions, as well as screens, furnishing complements, photo albums, CD holders, and all sorts of other unusual things that the artist has produced, ranging from design to painting. I was particularly struck by the use of colour; here at “Immagine” Maria Tarditi researches new lines, whilst preserving long-term memory. All the articles described by Guido Gozzano in his poem “Nonna Speranza” come to mind. Suffice it to mention, as it rightly should be done, all those articles designed by futurists, as well as those created in the ‘70s and ‘80s in a “reproducibility” climate. The articles display accurate craftsmanship and are made in natural materials: various types of wood, interlaced cotton, as well as selected and manually cut paper, which are painted with very original and highly water-resistant techniques. You will get the feeling of how art here relies on the “homemade” feature, and of how this aspect is regarded to have crucial importance by “Immagine” and by Maria Tarditi. Each painted article is a unique piece. Whites, light blues, yellows, reds, water-greens: all these colours are entrusted to the various objects with even hues and nuances, as well as to ancient paper coming from old sixteenth-century breviaries, and used to cover trays of modern workmanship; angels, amorettos, as well as splashes of colour resembling clouds, recall all the changeable sensitivity of informal art in the ‘60s. Art isn’t only painting, it isn’t only canvas, it isn’t only sculpture; art today is also expressed through extremely valuable artefacts, and is all the more vital the more harmonious it proves in recovering lost time and recreating it in contemporary life. I am quite sure that a lamp such as those produced by “Immagine” would have been appreciated by Borges, in the same way as the futurist lamps in the early 20th century gave life to Marinetti’s project for a “futurist reconstruction of the universe”. Traslation by Interpres

Francesca Maria Scalisi Incontrarti 2002 [Meeting You, 2002], the recent Sicilian exhibition held in Erice, focussed the spotlights on the young painter, Francesca Maria Scalisi from Trapani. On that occasion I saw and got to know her work, deeply rooted in the contemporary context with strong traces of neoinformalism, and perceived its unequalled tension. Francesca Scalisi has been working in the artistic context for the past ten years.
Her paintings do not rend the emotional fabric that relates us sensitively to things - poetry of quite another nature flows through them; they access an area where the mind clearly opens to flashes of inspiration, not of dawn or sunsets but of the extreme sense of colour, space and structure. They arise from gentle relations between biography and painting, between reality and imagination.
Francesca Maria Scalisi’s paintings expand space; a powerful personal artistic vision and a slow and imposing rhythm, are the constant mental references. Her paintings are “full of meaning”, because they present a new way of looking at the world of life, at the intrinsic rhythm of life.
There transpires a great visual concentration that recalls Rothko, Pollock and Wols, but which reveals an absolute and free study, that is new, extremely new, with new vibrations created by splashes of colour, which are at times intermittent and at times cold, untouchable and eternal.
Francesca Scalisi’s paintings are then infinite walls that enclose depths, events, veiled suggestions of love and mysteries. They relate with colours, signs and space, modern times, the time of modernity that recalls the past, existential grief and a cosmic dimension.
European collectors and readers of contemporary art consider this young Italian artist’s name a flame that pierces the world of creativity. We shall meet the artist again at an important Milanese exhibition in the near future – hence we can have a close look at these jewels of colour, these parts of sky, space and life. Translated by interpres sas