| Elena Mezzadra " Creator of Dipin logos " |
 The long history of Elena Mezzadra within the Milanese artistic environment is made up of precise milestones. First, an absolute faith in abstract art.
Second, a long relationship with Giovanni Fumagalli’s Galleria delle Ore in Milan, which after the Second World War was a reference point for research between abstract and informal. Here, in the seventies the artist meets engineer Antonio Boschi who throughout the years will buy many canvases, today representing part of the rich donation of the Boschi-Di Stefano collections at the Civic Museo del Novecento where already there was one of her paintings.Her journey is characterised by a constant adhesion to a certain way of conceiving painting. Without drastic caesura, her research within the abstract has aimed at perfecting, through continual variations, a single way of conceiving the painting. We are dealing with a personal and immediately recognisable style in which one must follow the imperceptible leaps and variations to make its chronological order. For this reason the artist has always been less inclined towards retrospective glances, as Luciano Caramel underlined while presenting her exhibition in 1992 at the PAC in Milan: “the recent activity is for her the fulfilment of a journey; therefore every new painting does not simply sum up previous research, but the last includes also the first, and this faith is expressed with the same intensity in the large format of the oil paintings as in the small format of the paper drawings, and in the more aristocratic dimension of the engraving”. This style, this idea of painting is to be connected to that line of abstract art that structures a painting, but without being cold and cerebral: too rigorous to be informal, too free to be abstract-concrete; and is precisely here the lyrical contribution of this fluctuating geometry made of transparent planes that are intersecting each other with a slow movement. The critics have particularly underlined within the artist’s production the problem of colour-light -almost a memory of futurist dynamism- ebbing away in vivacious descriptions: Flaminio Gualdoni has spoken of a “painting of light, great light”, while for Elena Pontiggia it is a geometric foundation “so ephemeral and transparent to become a pure luminous cartilage”. Instead, in 1979 Roberto Sanesi pointed out how Elena Mezzadra “more than abandon herself to light, uses its plastic qualities”. In this forest of lines and forms, of vibration of the pictorial story through progressive tonal passages, a sudden and cutting chromatic lighting is seen, in luminous and dynamic darts that orient the sense of the abstract story. Mezzadra represents a transitory state, dynamic not for the trace of a sign left by impulse, but for a sense of movement within the compositional structure, towards the progress of straight and broken lines that are inter-wined on the plane: the story is given by the movement of the eye, which is guided upon the surface of the canvas according to very precise directions. A ”futurist” mechanism, broadly speaking: the return of a movement via forms. Sanesi was right when he wrote that geometry, in her works, is “almost a natural architecture”, because this motion, this scanning of angular forms seems almost to be pushed by the wind (or by time), like a forest of signs that fluctuate with a harmonic cadence, nonetheless with a temperament, less violent, though certainly decisive and little inclined to make concessions. Dr. Luca Pietro Nicoletti  |
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