Fioretta

In this little retrospective exhibition, the first one after Fioretta Mazzucconi’s death in 1985, it’s not possible to present the whole of her work in an exhaustive manner, nor to pay homage to her as her work would deserve, but we can only approach it, with the purpose of remembering the artist and helping, I hope, the interest of the art world to arouse.
Fioretta has been a great artist, who has shared with other great artists not, alas, the success, but the sad destiny of being unknown and moreover to pay with her very life the gift of sensitiveness and talent which has made it so difficult.
It is quite enough to look at the exhibition play-bill painting for becoming aware of Fioretta’s destiny and poetry: the ‘Windows on the Garden’ is in reality a window on the life. The garden, that’s to say the life itself, is obscure and deprived of any joy in the desolate artist’s eyes, while it is suffused with poetry and spirituality in the part which is hidden by a curtain driven by a breeze. Where the miraculous breeze of poetry arrives, the fruits become rosy and ripe, while the one that remains outside, untouched by the grace, is dry and dead. There is also a pot, almost a container of the artist’ soul, of her life, which unfortunately remains outside the grace that approaches it, almost grazing it, but finally it doesn’t succeed in joining it.
The works which Fioretta left to us, in their aspects of grace or desolation, often deeply united, certainly deserve to be known as a rare example of authentic poetry, in a time in which so many artists certainly do not dialogue with the grace.
The painter mind, it’s true, ended by being deranged, but it is quite enough to look around for asking ourselves whether a much greater upset has not pushed such a great part of contemporary art outside the ‘breeze’ and outside humanity itself.

Vittorio Mazzucconi