My single line text
VOYAGE
…because making art is a kind of journey, a path to follow. Art as "the well of imagination where experiences converge and become expression".
A voyage therefore into the imagination, a fundamental element in arousing curiosity and then interest, passions, the fuel we need for dreaming, designing, building a future and cultivating the desire to move forward. It is important to have an interest and art is our aid with this.
To create one must know how to observe, to be curious. To not only look but to really see things. To create to be travellers of life and not tourists or even worse, mere spectators.
Art as a magnificent tool for knowing the world and ourselves, and to sometimes save us.
But the voyage may also be experienced in its multiple manifestations.
Growth as the voyage of a child along the path of life. "Chaque jour est un voyage" [every day is a voyage] and it is our duty as parents to prepare the suitcase that will accompany our children on his way. It is important that we pack the suitcase well because it is there that where our children will seek his tools to deal with the situations that he will face along the way.
There is the most difficult of journeys, the one within ourselves. A famous phrase says "the path poses the question to each one of us: who are you?"
And who are we? Are we happy? Are we what we want to be?
In order to answer we must embark on a difficult journey within ourselves that not all have the courage to face, preferring instead to create medical solutions to find relief.
And then there is the classic journey, one that takes us far away, that allows us to discover places and meet people. The trip that broadens the mind, enriching, testing us and making us feel alive.
Move, change, feel... be alive!
A hymn to travel, one involving places, landscapes, people, meetings, sensations, unexpected, dreams, fears.
"The sky above, the infinite inside" because "our life is profoundly ours and is worth living till the last kilometer!"
Mesdames et messieurs, bon voyage!!
Barbara Zanconato
Inaugural speech of the exhibitionVigoleno, september 3rd, 2011
review
VOYAGE
Andrea Fallini
Andrea Fallini
Sometimes life allows us to meet people who know how to go beyond, who can look to new horizons, who have the capacity and energy to open unexplored paths.
One of them is Barbara Zanconato.
Those who know her know also that she has painted in the most diverse techniques since she was old enough to hold a brush. It is not important to her to have attended one of the most prestigious schools of art, communication and design in Italy (Istituto Europeo di Design in Milan), to have illustrated the covers of Topolino (italian Mickey Mouse) at Walt Disney Italy for several years, nor to have participated in seminars and courses with famous illustrators and artists.
Art in the traditional sense has never been enough for her. She has never felt connected to informal, disengaged art, and she found the codified canons at Disney to be too narrow for her.
In addition, she has never been able to accept certain developments, perhaps extreme, in contemporary art in which the artist's craft has become more and more to "sell his art rather than basing it on the ability to do it" (J. Koons). In the midst of this discussion of the meaning and purpose of art, Barbara Zanconato has for several years proposed a personal and original interpretation: the meaning of art for her is as therapy, that of a real drug that can help solve the fundamental problem faced by modern man, the continuous and progressive detachment from his most intimate, deeper, more emotional part: his soul.
Her cultural and educational background (she is also a pharmacist) has allowed her to see the failure of the model on practical as well as critical levels, the widely dominant models which see us as biochemical machines to maintain in balance through the consumption of pills, syrups and supplements of various types.
As she has already pointed out in her works of 2010, we are increasingly ignoring the fact that we have a soul with its aspirations and its requirements. This means that when the soul speaks through sensations and feelings, having lost the habit of listening to its voice, we often (or we prefer to think we do) fall under the influence of a disease and we look for a cure, a medicine... unfortunately only ever among biochemical possibilities.
Barbara Zanconato has long since convinced many of us that art can be a powerful mean of descending into the depths of ourselves, of getting closer to our soul and of caring for it. This brings us into communion not only with ourselves but with the world around us, allowing us to discover the soul even in the simplest things, in nature, in others.
During this process - and perhaps this is another crucial aspect of her personal art – she knows how to bring out the best by us causing us to glimpse new possibilities and teaching us to think differently about what our potentials are. She does this with old and forgotten objects, destined to the dustbin, by giving them a second chance and a new life.
Her work is an invitation to see things in a new way, to discover new possibilities and opportunities, to broaden our horizons and open up new and different worlds, experiences and sensations...
... just like a voyage.
One of them is Barbara Zanconato.
Those who know her know also that she has painted in the most diverse techniques since she was old enough to hold a brush. It is not important to her to have attended one of the most prestigious schools of art, communication and design in Italy (Istituto Europeo di Design in Milan), to have illustrated the covers of Topolino (italian Mickey Mouse) at Walt Disney Italy for several years, nor to have participated in seminars and courses with famous illustrators and artists.
Art in the traditional sense has never been enough for her. She has never felt connected to informal, disengaged art, and she found the codified canons at Disney to be too narrow for her.
In addition, she has never been able to accept certain developments, perhaps extreme, in contemporary art in which the artist's craft has become more and more to "sell his art rather than basing it on the ability to do it" (J. Koons). In the midst of this discussion of the meaning and purpose of art, Barbara Zanconato has for several years proposed a personal and original interpretation: the meaning of art for her is as therapy, that of a real drug that can help solve the fundamental problem faced by modern man, the continuous and progressive detachment from his most intimate, deeper, more emotional part: his soul.
Her cultural and educational background (she is also a pharmacist) has allowed her to see the failure of the model on practical as well as critical levels, the widely dominant models which see us as biochemical machines to maintain in balance through the consumption of pills, syrups and supplements of various types.
As she has already pointed out in her works of 2010, we are increasingly ignoring the fact that we have a soul with its aspirations and its requirements. This means that when the soul speaks through sensations and feelings, having lost the habit of listening to its voice, we often (or we prefer to think we do) fall under the influence of a disease and we look for a cure, a medicine... unfortunately only ever among biochemical possibilities.
Barbara Zanconato has long since convinced many of us that art can be a powerful mean of descending into the depths of ourselves, of getting closer to our soul and of caring for it. This brings us into communion not only with ourselves but with the world around us, allowing us to discover the soul even in the simplest things, in nature, in others.
During this process - and perhaps this is another crucial aspect of her personal art – she knows how to bring out the best by us causing us to glimpse new possibilities and teaching us to think differently about what our potentials are. She does this with old and forgotten objects, destined to the dustbin, by giving them a second chance and a new life.
Her work is an invitation to see things in a new way, to discover new possibilities and opportunities, to broaden our horizons and open up new and different worlds, experiences and sensations...
... just like a voyage.
