1999 at Lattuada Studio, Milan, Italy
by By Franco Farina
Those who paint give their representations the content, knowledge and information that relates to their socio-culture and their intellectual background.
The stronger and the more familiar an artist’s image is, the more it shares and relates to the knowledge and experience of others, and to those principles that give life a higher quality, of which art is one.
Angiola Churchill knows well that the image is a prerogative and particularity of art, whose outcomes in infinite variations perform specific functions involving the social, spiritual, religious and political spheres.
This exhibition in Milan is a collection of the last five years, which in spirit and execution maintains a deep relationship to previous experiences. Now her long experience in the use of paper has been turned to the repetitive, mockingly attentive, curious and often astonished representation of the stereotyped eye.
Without mentioning the eye’s symbolic value in myth and sacred representations, one needs only to turn to everyday ordinary language and its numerous expressions to recognize the importance and significance of the “organ of vision”. Here are some common phrases: “the mind’s eye” (memory); “to open one’s eyes for the first time” (to be born); “to close one’s eyes for the last time” (to die); “to turn a blind eye to” (to ignore); “the eye of the day” (the sun); “what the eye sees not….”; “with one’s eyes open”; “the eye must be pleased”; “an eye for an eye”.
When one thinks of adjectives qualifying the eye and expressing a physical or psychological condition, then one sees how important, incisive and rooted the organ of vision is in the sphere of communication. An eye can be bewildered, blazing, brisk, expressive, gloomy, greedy, grim, icy, innocent, languishing, loving, melancholy, sad, searching, sharp, sinister, sleepy, sparkling, staring, sweet, threatening, watchful, wild.
The collaged eye as an “entrance”, as a place of passage to somewhere else, is inducement to make a journey to the known and the unknown.
Surmounting the boundaries of collage and painting the work comes to an autonomous completeness through stylistic contributions.
Angiola Churchill is aware and determined to the firm belief that art is a ground for action and situations – and hence relationships – where the multiplicity of the real finds its synthesis. She acts without the expressive renouncement typical of the “conceptual”, while dilating to the utmost the combinatorial possibilities of a non-univocal reality and its understanding.
In this sense her works are strengthened by the lures of contamination: the technical performance indifferently uses traditional artistic media with hints or reflections of technological visual effects that expand comprehension.
Angiola Churchill’s quest is interesting and productive: certainly the first lap of the race has been secured in the continuous move forward to the finishing line, if in art a finishing line exists.