by Lorenzo Canova

06.3.2017

Immersed in a sea of light, a journey through a flowering of colour, a descent into the ferment of coloured materials and the freedom of her energy: the works of Maria Rita Vita are placed in the grand tradition of gestural art and of the path that leads directly from the sources that spring from the unconscious, following a passage that from surrealism meets the American action painting and a significant part of the European “Art Informal” movement.
Maria Rita Vita however, rarely uses a dramatic palette dominated by blacks, reds and greys that gives a sense of lost existence of the generation of artists active immediately after the Second World War, she seems to have modelled her painting on another plane ,in a conversation with a brighter side then the naturalistically informal, a deliberate retelling from a history of the study of colour and light that is found at the beginning of impressionist art.
In fact one of the references chosen by Maria Rita Vita seems to be the artist Claude Monet, in particular his splendid water lily series, in a flow of liquid colour arising in direct comparison with the splendid lyrical vibrations of the master impressionist in which the shapes are erased to become a sentiment of panic,a nature not anymore envisaged but penetrated deep into the heart of the being.
It is not by chance that Maria Rita Vita’s paintings seem to be dominated by nostalgia for the spring, for the rebirth and for the restored warmth of her light taken to a higher frequency, an almost mystical elevation of the extension of herself which reflects in the fervid interweaving of brush strokes and droplets, in a dripping canvas like a coloured inlay which unites logic and emotion ,giving sentiment,finding balance in a harmony not infrequently based on a composition playing with a rhythm of opposites.
Therefore the artists paintings are made up of abstract and imaginary landscapes ,a metaphorical delight for the eye in a deep relationship with nature and it’s beauty ,with a deep tactile look that meets the objects through a perceptual guide of a picture seen as an instrument of interpretation and reconstruction of the world.
The artist therefore uses with efficacy her artistic method to give life to a style ,that at the same time is quick and thoughtful,a compositional system where the strength of the colours, the energy of the brushstrokes,of the droplets and the thickening of materials becomes balanced and made more vivid thanks to the light mesh of subtle , intangible , interconnected marks.
So Maria Rita Vita traces visible itineraries that go from the microscopy of the cells to the unmeasurable stars of the cosmos, she drops into the deep obscure spaces and discovers jewelled stars born into the abyss of an unknown universe.
In this way, the artist returns to the origins of abstract art, to an affinity with one of its founding fathers ,Wassily Kandinsky, with music,the synchronised and synesthetic rapport between notes and colours , in a coloured space which goes from the immeasurable perfection and harmony of the heavens to the imperceptible sounds of the small things, from the dangerous and deathly song of the sirens to the white song of the angels of which whose presence seems to be alluded to with absolute candour in a painting layout which ascends in a glow of gold.
Maria Rita Vita elevates like this ,her art, like a bird of prey that travels the fiery sky, she transforms the muddy and essential substances in the silt of the riverbed,the fruitful humid legacy of a substance which fertilisers the earth, making it intangible like a memory of a scent that blows from the blooming blues and violets and brings it back richer ,the throbbing stratified material in an accumulation of fragments of memory,thickened in the tangible depth of the hours that pass rapidly and where in which developing memories are based in a tangle of interwoven moments, in the cobweb of a time evoked and redeemed by the hand that paints the picture on the canvas.

Lorenzo Canova is an associate professor at the university of “Studi del Molise” , where he founded and directs the ARATRO ( archive of electronic art-laboratory for contemporary art). His chosen fields are modern and contemporary art and in particular sixteenth century roman , second half of the twentieth century and the last generation of Italian and international artists.. He has curated various exhibitions in museums and public spaces of which ,in collaboration with the Minister for Foreign affairs the Farnesina collection (with Maurizio Calvesi),“Experimental” dedicated to young artists and “Futuro Italiano” at the European Parliament Bruxelles. He collaborates with the Avvenire newspaper and is a member of the scientific committee and board of the Giorgio and Isa De Chirico foundation.