Art Critic and Art Historian
MIMETIC TRASMUTATION
Preparing to return to the continent of spirituality, Carla Sello presents in India an exhibition entitled ‘Mimetic
Transmutation’ – a series of works made with plastic according to a totally personal technique. Once again, her work recalls previous experiences: in fact, plastic is transformed into something totally new, a physical and mental metamorphosis that the artist operates through the use of material that is harmful to the environment.
Once assembled and converted into a work of an unnatural beauty, a new perception of nature takes place, ranging from planets unrelated to our solar system, to familiar landscapes: canyons, valleys and prairies, but also synapses, organic tissues, neuronal networks, that lead the viewer from the infinitely large to the immensely small.
When Alberto Burri was melting his plastics, in the sixties, the problem of pollution by polymer was not yet perceived by the public. Moreover, Italy was in the midst of an economic boom, during which plasti materials were becoming products of daily use. Although there was a feeling of reaction to a society that was too
oriented towards the utilization of mass consumer products, the environmental havoc we were about to generate was not being, yet, fully considered.
However, the work of the Umbrian artist who was transforming plastic into something tragic and sublime, altogether, was certainly representing some food for thought.
Today, we strive to continuously alert people about the damages caused by plastic. We propose recycling and recovery solutions, but we are facing an unfair battle between an exaggerated consumption of goods and the need to keep the environment clean. Fifty years after those melted plastics, Carla Sello wonders about the destiny of the human species and of those materials, however with an attitude different from the informality of Burri. Plastic is still the protagonist, but now it becomes a source of vital beauty. No longer the shock of the burning flame and of the melted material causing injuries and black abrasions, the plastic is transformed by Carla Sello into a flower garden full of bright colors.
The work with plastic is the physical and mental metamorphosis elaborated by the artist through the use of a material considered harmful for the environment: that material is transformed and elevated to its unnatural beauty.
Entirely made of plastic, these works surprise for the brilliance of colors and the ability to show us a wonderful world.
It is like facing a new perception of nature, almost like flying over planets alien to our solar system, and then
descending and penetrateing into the inner secrets of matter. There are canyons, valleys and prairies, but also synapses, organic tissues, neuronal networks, crossing the infinitely large and then sinking into the immensely small.
Carla Sello combines Macrocosm and Microcosm, revealing the most intimate sense of matter and showing a sense of hidden beauty that is up to each of us to seek and return to the world.
VORTEX
Carla Sello’s artistic parable continues, sensitive to the themes of the Cosmos and the environment, in the exhibition entitled Vortex held in 2017 at the Centre d’Art Citadine of Tamil Nadu, in India. It is a series dedicated to the cosmos and the galaxies, where the artist investigates the temporal and material dimension of space, attracted by the spiral shape.
A mathematical principle, the basis of the golden ratio and of Fibonacci’s numerical progression, the spiral or vortex is the founding element of every cosmic system. In the universe everything is eternally in motion, regularly rotating on its axis, and everything always takes place in this perpetual motion.
Carla Sello’s works investigate the shape of the vortex using natural colors and sands. She enjoys a direct and continuous contact with nature, in a constant dimension of balance between the outer and the inner being.
In this sense, Vortex is to be read as a sort of passageway between this search for meaning and the new pictorial season of Mimetic Transmutation.
SAXSUM
It can be said that Carla Sello’s works are a quick medium between painting and sculpture, given her utilization of a variety of materials and techniques.
The fluid, clean lines and the colors that are manifested in her works are inspired by the observation of nature.
The matter and the colors mix with each other showing a reality made of visions and meditations, feelings and emotions that are transformed into soft lines, and spirituality finds a correspondence in the brilliance of the tones, while the matter finds its expression in the dense pastosity of the colors, generously distributed on the painting.
The encounter between these two extremes gives the viewer the feeling of being sucked into the vortex of existence, in which the past comes to the surface, as claimed by C.G. Jung, from the unknown psyche affected by the fuzzy whirlpools of the unconscious, recalled by the need to find a balance in the present time.
NERO
Returning from a very comprehensive anthology in India, her second home, the Sello painter, sculptress, videomaker, and teacher, has created for ‘black’ a “Cosmic Egg” that she so explains:… “Many representations of the Great Mother are made on black obsidian. Black is associated with fertility, because it is the color of the earth. The sacred places of men are the caves, where they find refuge, and where they celebrate initiation rituals… The cave as a uterine metaphor for transformation and rebirth. The egg has always taken on the fundamental meaning of life in gestation and that of full consciousness …”