Alessandra Roccasalva

Graphic designer, born in 1978, I live and work in Marina di Ragusa. I graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Catania, specializing in painting and cultural heritage.

I started making collages for fun, mostly drawing inspiration from works of art, and with millions of dots of “Bézier” I cut out, isolate and piece together other beautiful nature. I believe that images, due to their ambiguity and immense range of meanings, are a much more accurate means of breaking down and transmitting our perception of sensible reality.

Weird Fishes

Women, fishes, flowers, constellation, chemical formulas, vectorial math, mind syntagms and subconscious ontologies. Alexandra’s inner universe is a blend of appealings, refer- ences, memory paradigma where the author absorbs the past to set the path for a new order ruled by feminin sensibility and a gentle, timeless beauty.

In a figurative short-circuit between past and present, her surreal collages are a well-educated retread of the history of art upon a technological note. The artist makes hers some of the most famous contemporary icons to narrate, in some sort of sarcastic puzzle game, her passions, her driving concepts… in short, her life. She does it with that typical, close to obsessive, care of details that is the, well known, modus operandi of a graphic designer.

A reworking that turns these illustrations into mirrors of the soul, into metaPhysical visions able to convey a sensa- tion of a seductive mistery where everything is symbolic and engages further meanings. Behind the references is hidden the explicit will to share, with the audience, the rediscovery of ancient art; with the recursive use of the number three, mainly connected with the fish image, her own identity; with the recalls to the water theme, the choice of a life in close contact with the sea; with the female portraits the beilef that the role of the woman should be more and more leading in contemporary society.

Weird fishes – to sum it up – is an imaginary travel in her intimate and onirical sphere, that begins in that interdi- mention between dream and reality.

 

Ciro Salinitro

bio

I make collages for pleasure. It is a practice that gives me joy, connecting me with the power of my own being. A sort of daydream during which I cut out an element for hours, connect it to other ones that will be part of the collage, find their chemistry through shapes and colors, and look for a subtle balance.

An operation that lets me slide towards the freedom of a dream where everything becomes possible, a return to the innocence of the child who discovers reality through play. As I compose the collage, I always marvel at the new world I’m entering: it’s there that I want to get lost to find myself again.

So fish swim in the clouds, architectural constructions dangle outside the patterns of the laws of gravitation, nature takes back its space, merges and stands out in impossible scenarios; the moon, archetype of the femininity and creative power, with its countless colors is a halo of sanctity that guides you in the darkness of the night and, since time no longer exists, illuminates the same day, or peeps into a room, in geometric spaces where clouds hover, ethereal support for Madonnas and saints.

Thus female portraits, mostly masterpieces of the great Renaissance masters, become the central element, the reference in a didactic and pedagogical key to dust off, discover or rediscover the history of art: as I am a woman it’s about women I want to talk about, whispering to an attentive ear.

Mathematical and physical formulas, geometric constructions, algebra and sacred texts are the symbol of a reason that wants to “control” the origins and the sense of creation: and therefore tears! The suffering of human beings. It doesn’t really matter what you suffer for, they’re all just missed desires.

We live as there is a continued absence, absent from the world that hosts us, handled by mechanisms that make us move as marionettes in this stage named life, while the oracle of Delphi, in a very refined and lapidary way, continues to indicate our way: nosce te ipsum, “know yourself”.

So the collage becomes for me a constant research, the possibility of tapping into a source of creative self-investigation. Guided by the mind we get lost. The natural state of the human being would be that spontaneous happiness that inevitably escapes from our daily vision, which we hardly center. Only those rare moments in which we truly “are” remain to us, immersed in the beauty of a sunset, in the silence of a forest where the snow changes the color to the landscape like sparkling fireflies, or in the everlasting and iridescent motion of the sea, in the sweet or mournful melody in which it transports us. In these places we find ourselves as ancient roots of a tree, high connections, attentive antennas.

In these other senses I find myself. In these “other-minds”… This is where my desire to communicate through collages comes from: a cut and sew deep in my soul to answer the primary question: “Who am I?”.

All forms of art have a single purpose: to create a connection with everything that welcomes us.

I believe that the human essence is creative, the way in which each of us expresses it doesn’t matter. What matters is the awareness of the message we promote. Especially nowadays, in a world where the pollution that comes from social digitalization has the upper hand, where information of all kinds, visual and auditory, constantly hammers us, the message can become a silent struggle that finds a way to reach its real recipients. This is why I said in the beginning of this article that I create collages for the pleasure that gives me: there is a story behind them. The images, the tool I have chosen, have a terrific communicative power, and my giving is a present, the mission I have given myself in this world. We are here to “serve”, that’s why I create.

2022
WEIRD FISHES,
Antico convento dei Cappuccini,
Ragusa Ibla. ITALY
13th - 21th May 2023
"De Collage. (Im)probable portraits of women and other"
Fondazione Donà dalle Rose, Palermo, Italy

15th October - 13th November 2022
Mirror face to face | Italia-Olanda Italian and Macedonian Artist Exhibition
Bitola
1st - 30th September 2022
“Mirror face to face | Italia-Olanda”
Italian and Duch Artist Exhibition
Amstelkerk, Amstelved 10
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
15th October - 13rd November 2022
Kunstliedfde, Nobelstraat 12 A
Utrecht, The Netherlands
4th - 20th November 2022
Villa Caldogno, via G. Zanella 3
Caldogno (VI), Italia
21th May - 6th June 2022
Mirror face to face | Italia-Olanda Italian and Macedonian Artist Exhibition
Villa Caldogno, via G. Zanella 3 Caldogno (VI), Italia
1st - 30th July 2022
Diseñadores en el camino...
se hace collage al andar
Gáldar, Canary Islands, Spain
19th April  / 8th May 2022
AT A CROSSROADS
Van Der Plas Gallery,
Orchard Street, New York, NY

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