Jazzed emotions beyond time and spaceMay 31, 2007
June 2007 exhibit titled – "Jazzed emotions beyond time and space..."
Why JAZZ... Emotions... Time... Space...
"Jazz" - the story of America... A survival story… being told at the Baobab through the paintings of a female Italian pharmacist turned artist, Angela Rossi. Angela was the featured artist selected by Commune Cultura Perugia for the 2006 Perugia, Umbria, Italy Jazz festival that has featured the biggest jazz composer, whence her inspiration.
At the Baobab, her works will tell the story of a popular music art form born out of the antipathic buffoonery of New Orleans and quickly developed into colorful afrotypic notes by people Angela and the world now call the “Icons of Jazz.” The cacophony of the music – improvisation – allowed the new art form to migrate across the Wilson Dixon line all the way to Harlem, NY, where it develop into a magical potion of the arts and culture scene. This genre of music set ablaze as well in the mid-west ravishing white musicians of Jewish and Italian descent who tasted a note played by their black peers. Till this day, we remain in awe. Silenced by talent. Assimilated into a transracial genre of music. May be its time to talk about that survival story... The Baobab delightfully bring to Rochester a multiracial and multicultural breathtaking visual essay dedicated to the emotional expressions of Jazz Icons in "sounds of color" that swing to a glorious African American story.
About Angela Rossi
Angela Rossi was born in Paganica (L’Aquila) and graduated from the University of Milan with a degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences.
In the late 1930s she studied and explored watercolor techniques, creating artwork of extraordinary lyricism and exquisite tonal refinement. She later continued her studies in neoinformal poetics, producing artwork on paper and cloth where iconic elements reach out from the material surfaces.
A fine series of paintings on women (a topic she is presently very interested in, and which is very close to her personally) was also produced in this same period. The exhibiting of her work has been noteworthy; Angela Rossi has carried out personal exhibitions, and her artwork has been included in prestigious collective art shows, as also in museums and civic art collections.
In 2004, her artwork took on a new emphasis, which ever since has included music and the emotional energy, which is characteristic of Jazz and its protagonists, as embodied in her latest series of paintings entitled "The Icons of Jazz".
About the "Icons of Jazz" by Antonio Gasbarrini. Exerpt from the Catalogue "Icone del Jazz", Angelus Novus Edizioni, 2004
Angela Rossi’s explorations of "sounds of color", entitled Icons of Jazz, is a collection of 41 works on plexiglass and sized at 70 x 100 cm (horizontally) and 100 x 70 cm (vertically). Angela’s pieces expose emblematically the indissoluble link between music and painting in effigies of the principal protagonists, historical and contemporary, of the world of jazz. Angela Rossi’s figurative portraits, representing famous people with their instruments and voice, are inspired by popular photographs (from newspapers, magazines, books, and internet), and are influenced by post-pop art (and necessarily so, considering the American roots of jazz music), while at the same time having close associations with abstract expressionism.
Her work captures the essence of Modernism, which, instead of stopping at anthropomorphic or detailed realism, conjures the atmosphere of a place where open and closed spaces are both bold and attenuated in their resonance, with their rhythmic variations in massive colors almost brought to a whisper and never, expressionistically, shouted. Moreover, for some pieces the original icon was painted on the backside of the plexiglass as a positive image, so that the finished painting appears as a mirror-image. It is a challenging play on "reality vs fiction", a simulation of "changing physionomies" caught-in-the-act of their performances, as contemporary art evolves into something ever more disconcerted and disconcerting (three dimensional renderings of photographs). We evidence here the proof, and the success, of the risks involved in chromatically "modifying" these portraits with warm, earthy, blue, grey, and "acid" yellow-green colors, through the close-up perspective of faces and bodies freely elasticized.
The life-force of each of Angela Rossi’s icons is captured in the fundamental comparison between the photographic mould (flat in nature due to its bidimensionality) and its voluminized pictorial representation, often embodying an apollinian-dionysian dialectic characteristic of such tragic and drammatic biographies. "Simonide", said Plutarch, "defined painting as silent poetry, and poetry as a vocal painting; painters render actions as they occur, but words after they have been pronounced." Carrying out the concept "Ut pictura poesis" (the humanistic theory that painting is equal to poetry) in her artwork, Angela Rossi pays special attention in her dynamically plastic renderings of hands and mouths, "essential" tools for any sung or played musical piece.
Music and painting, or, sound and color – be inspired by the magic of the show and Angela’s talent.
Visit http://www.angela-rossi.com for details on Angela’s artistic accomplishments and for a full view of her portfolio.