September 12 - October 18, 1992
Palace of Diamonds Civic Gallery of Modern Art, Ferrara Councillorship Cultural Institutions
by Franco Farina
Of all the various possible critical approaches that Angiola Churchill’s works call to mind, the one which immediately comes unbidden is not so much an appraisal of their indisputable value and their expressive potential; it is rather the emerging underlay that attests to personal experiences originating in a composite culture cast from different molds. Diverse operative tendencies are unmistakable, their roots in disparate heritages of the sigh, made explicit here, now, with a measured and restrained gestuality in which painterly textures of a high tonal gradient are enhanced. When we look carefully at these works, we sense behind them the anxiety of a hypothetical story, one which not has not been and could not be entrusted to actual figures, but rather to the intimate suggestion, the affecting pattern of a distant awareness, re-echoing nostalgias of a more poignant and deeply felt humanity. The natural element is thus not missing here; quite the contrary, its constant sublimated presence is implicit in the expressiveness of the whole composition, consistently rich in intimations and allusions in the awesome unfurling of shapes which are sometimes angular, sometimes rounded, sometimes angular and rounded at the same time, and in the indicative alternation of positive and negative, almost as if to highlight possible emblematic coexistences and iconographic consonances.
It has been discerningly noted more than once that Angiola Churchill’s works are the result of painstaking, intent analyses spanning organic memory and the imaginary, analyses filtered and decanted and then taken up once again with the aim of expressing the inexpressible by means of a rigorous palette, severe and simple, yet always evocative of a heart-felt sentiment and human apprehensions.
It is tus clear that she has chosen not to look directly at the manifestations of the world around her, but rather to perceive the reverberations relentlessly aroused in her innermost depths by the contingent, seeking to accentuate, and to broaden, the emotional factor within the circumscribed space of the canvas. What now matters to Angiola Churchill is not representing the phenomenon or the actual event in itself, but evoking the incidence and psychological configuration of those particular events, naturally enriched by concurrences resurfacing in memory, without a doubt a captivating experience which condenses in a particular significant relationship both creative potentiality and sensations, where even amendments aid the growth and the stratification of the works, extending the perspective and opening them up to a range of readings in a boundless ideal space.