2003 at Museum Fortuny, Venice, Italy
by Silvio Fuso, director of Museum Fortuny
It seems particularly difficult to describe, in such a brief statement, the uniqueness of a work and of a creative process whose suggestiveness never ceases to attract and astonish. Angiola Chruchill is an artist that is blessed by the grace of a “synthetic effectiveness” in which symbolism, vision and a great ability for decorativeness are harmoniously founded.
I would like to pay particular attention to her ability for decorativeness. Perhaps it is because of the natural affinity that it has with the spirit of the polyhedric work of Mariano Fortuny: indeed, as soon as I saw the sumptuous garden created by Angiola in the ground floor exhibit space of the Palazzo Fortunny, it called to mind Mariano’s access to from the artist’s photos. In entering the interior of well-defined spaces and boundaries, of milk-white transparencies, both express a precise concept and view of art and beauty. If for Fortuny all of these qualities are expressed above all in the realization of his stupendous fabrics and of the famous delphos, for Angiola they lead toward a visionary intuition of reality.
The decorative motifs, the knowledgeable manipulation of the paper, the subtle use of luminous effects, accumulate to create the essence of a world that, to be imaginative and imagined, is not less concrete or possible.
The rigorous union of constrictive and decorative approaches renders Beyond the Garden a work that is radically “other” with respect to the Babele of the contemporary, in so much that the Labyrinth, the Garden, the Space without a Name allude to an important and mysterious function. Easy allegories are left aside in the name of a higher metaphorical concept of the artistic act.
In Angiola’s work the forms of nature and human culture are reproduced and reduced to their essences using the skills of the craftsman as the most important key of interpretation and as a sober ethic authenticity.
The “disinterested” aspect of beauty is all together prevalent, indeed, far from the necessity of indicating meanings or proposing messages, it simply is.