Hidden flower, from La Flor Que Yo Esperaba
I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, topaz,
Or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off :
I love you just as certain hidden things are loved,
In secret, between the shadow and the soul.
Brigitta Rossetti’s spiritual journey as an artist and woman seems to set off from these lines. It is a long, often hard-fought journey which stemmed from the awareness, instilled into her soul by Pablo Neruda’s poetry, that the struggle required to assert her extraordinary strength as a woman had been weakened, impaired and almost defeated by mental fatigue.
“I did no longer remember what emotions can spring out of passion”, once Brigitta Rossetti revealed in a markedly interior dialogue, which eventually came to light in one moment of intimate terms with the world.
“Poetry is meant to walk about in darkness and run into the heart of men, the eyes of women, unknown travellers and people who at twilight or in the middle of a starry night, need to be spellbound by maybe just a single line…”, Pablo Neruda wrote in his autobiographical work Confieso que he vivido (I confess that I have lived), and Brigitta is one of those who felt the need to be spellbound by that single line of poetry. She, a poet herself, has seized that line and turned it into a matter that brings out lights and shadows, black and white shades.
Delicately, through the flowers that stand out on the canvas. Yet such delicacy reveals a perception still shaded by emotion, not yet a full outburst of the stunning sensuality of life. The artist’s quest is still in progress, with a feeling that something is fermenting inside her, like “the plant that never blooms but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers”, as the poet said.
She needs wide spaces for her art, she needs to investigate the nature of both the landscape and of people. Although introverted, Brigitta Rossetti has a really transparent soul, as you can realise when you watch her carefully packing and moving the small and large canvases of her works to be sent across the ocean that separates old Europe, where she lives and works, from the New World, where her works were at first discovered and appreciated.
She would probably like to be packed in the large crates that shelter her works and never be separated by the shapes, the matter, the smell of her paintings.
The moon glows like phosphorous on the vagrant waters.
Days, all one kind, go chasing each other.
The fog clears up in dancing figures.
A silver gull slips down from the west.
Sometimes a sail. High, high stars.
Brigitta’s works are going to be impressed by such images while crossing the wide ocean that stretches between the continents, providing fresh inspiration for the creation of new works there in Chicago, only a few days before the exhibition: paper flowers that alternate in a perfect, almost Warhol-like composition and indicate that changes are likely to occur.
Black and white hues are going to be superseded by new shades from the soul. Leaves, flowers, skies, inner emotions are at last portrayed with warmer shades, ranging from purple to pink, from green to lavender blue.
I want to do with you
what spring does with the cherry trees
A too long repressed sensuality breaks forth forcefully. Works grow in size, boldly and shamelessly attracting the eyes, as though aware of their allure. The visitor is impressed and feels that the artist’s look is now fervent, even though not fully satiated from the explosion of colours and hues that nature bestows upon us.
The night beats in those intense eyes you have
Flowering fresh arms and a lap of rose
Your breasts resemble the white shells of snails
A shadow butterfly lies asleep on your belly
A scanty choice of colours is what Brigitta makes, as typical of her. But with only few hues she works wonders: bright flowers reveal her moods mirrored in people’s eyes, her heart, the need to love and be loved. Just like everyone of us who looks for, wishes, dedicates their life without, at times, being able to find the words to express it.
However an artist can succeed in it and even create the well of emotions: the big cubes gathered at the heart of the exhibition lead visitors towards self-analysis as though dreams were being probed .
I want a young man to find life
in the hardness I painstakingly built up with metals,
as from a box, when you open it, and are face-to-face
and by plunging his soul inside, to touch the windblasts
that moulded my joy, there on the stormy plateau…
Luigi Franchi - Journalist
