Vittoria Chierici. Battaglie. [Edizione Italiana e Inglese]

An original thematic monograph dedicated to one of the favorite subjects of the Bolognese painter Vittoria Chierici (1955), the battle, a theme of ancient origin that has been tackled by numerous masters of the past and the present, from Paolo Uccello to Leonardo and from Picasso to Carrà.
As Achille Bonito Oliva writes in his introductory essay, we can also regard the dramatic event of war as a metaphor for the creative process of the artist. In fact the artist crosses swords, as if in a sort of clash-encounter, of conflict with the world, and out of this conflict is able to formalize the clash and deposit it systematically in a formal result. The result of the battles of Vittoria Chierici is to construct a style.
They are not, in other words, just the outcome this is very important of true documentations of a moment of violence and conflict, of mourning, of death. It is as if in her works there is a capacity, an awareness of the autonomous ability of language to set the event of war, of battle, at a distance and arrive at the firmness of a visual sequence in which, in effect, there is no detail of death in the foreground that aims to grab the observer's attention. Rather, there is the insertion of death within a language of lines of conflict, of lines of force that come from far away: starting out from Paolo Uccello's Battle of San Romano and reaching as far as Boccioni's The City Rises.
And so the whole history of art unfolds, not as simple memory, but as the way that Vittoria Chierici elaborates an iconography of the battle [].
Paolo Uccello is in a way recorded, captured, grasped and digested precisely through the comprehension of the Battle of San Romano, where even the shapes of the horses, seen from behind, are in reality the support of a form and become occasions of a symbol. From Paolo Uccello to Vittoria Chierici, we can say that even death is a color.
In this way, we pass through memories that range from Leonardo, Paolo Uccello and Boccioni to the cinematographic one of Eisenstein, but we also find ourselves inside the construction of visual pyramids in which the primacy of depth, distance and measure is reestablished. And the conflict of art finds a measure of its own too. If conflict in life is always gestural, an abolition of reason, Vittoria Chierici restores to battle a total dimension, a depth. The battle as place of knowledge, of visual and philosophical exploration of life.