In the painting of Linda Carrara

The paintings of Linda Carrara are a limpid enigma.A mixture of light and silence welcomes the sight laid upon them.

Her work is mastered by the contrast, by the meticulous tension of opposing forces. It seems that a dull strain arouses under the visible surface of her works, in a billowy and perpetual moving. The more I look at her works, the more I wonder. Apparently, everything is quiet, marbled by a moveless queen Medusa; and yet in her canvas a dazed excipient seems to act: the geometry acquires a linear vitality and the use of the blots and of the color flows opens dynamic and gurgling spaces where it's easy to get lost in endless ways of escape. The chromatic values, at first sight so weak, earthly and material, not saturated and even muddy, often turning to acid greens and foggy grays, are almost blinded and made compact by abstract whites, or shrouded by cosmic blacks, recalling us the purely conceptual spaces of solitude (in particular, give a glance to the series Alchemy of the dark 2010-2012). What makes this contrast not turned into a disaster is a peculiar strategy that the painter Linda Carrara followed. In her work, she abolished every hierarchy of values among the objects: «Everything has the dignity to be represented and the dignity to represent our world» she said. Thus, hers is a painting of awaiting and of liberation: each thing of the world is waiting to break free. Wether it is a human figure or a still life, painting collects around the visible what is left behind by the perpetual moving of the living, as it were a shining snail slime. It is a mnestic trace, a memory, a restored fragment of an interior vision (the Carrara's canvas seem all a meditation based upon the dreamlike analysis of her memories: as we could watch, being rational, at the dream we've memory to have lived); and yet never it's perceptible the stale smell of the elegy, never is perceptible a sad commemoration of the past. In her work there's the awareness of who knows the limits, of who tries to trace the limit between what she had lived and what her art could recalled: here no ones wants to hide anything to the viewer of the creative and critic process of the painting. If you look carefully, many works of Linda Carrara are paintings upon the genesis of the pictorial imagine. The space supposed to be real, due to the light and color quality, is often represented as it were on the other side of a mirror, beyond it, outside, before us, beyond any fictional process, ungraspable; while the fictional space is in the middle of the canvas, as it were the real centre of the meditation, a diagram of memory reached through technique.In her work what enchants the viewer and nail down the onlooker is the dazzle of something coming back in its pristine power to shine, painted exactly in its quiet and obscure life of potentiality. Every thing seems to be an omen: each events of our life could be transformed into gold, to reword the title of one painting; each thing is there, ready; if held by human hands upon the brim of the visible, if kept in the paradox, between the material mud of the painting and the abstraction of the form and of the memory, each thing could be called truth, dwelled by beauty.

Tommaso Di DioFebbraio 2015