MIRANDA MAGISTRELLI
A small flower cannot be what it is not, and it is not a question of love.
Miranda Magistrelli's passion for art has been familiar to me for a long time and this leads me to express a more than favorable opinion on her work, conducted with so much love. The artist's maturity from the analyzes of his dreamed-up compositions, be they floral subjects or still lifes, landscapes or figures. Miranda approaches art with a sensitive soul and personality.
His paintings are elaborated with a confident language, festive colors, romantic spirit, sometimes suffused with melancholy; but always with sincere dedication, a strong emotional sense and a subtle thread of poetry.
Francesco G. Rinone (painter from Vercelli 1901-1985)
In past centuries, in the one just passed and perhaps still today, women have often been asked to be something other than themselves first. They were asked to be wives, mothers, nurses, housewives who took care of the house and the people who lived in it, they were asked to be the emotional guardians of husbands and children. From the post-war period onwards they were asked to work, and to become those sorts of "racing animals", which still populate the streets today, especially in front of schools and offices.
When you are a woman you often have the feeling of "having no other choice" and that choosing or not choosing is a luxury that can cost you and those you love dearly.
Miranda Magistrelli was an artist, she possessed a sort of "sacred fire" within herself that accompanied her throughout her life. Like many women, she made choices that earned her the love of the large family in which she grew up, but there was more in her, an emotional urgency that led her to penetrate the world with her big green eyes, in her there was it was a different vision, a creative, or rather creative, necessity that led her, despite family commitments, to always cultivate art, poetry and culture.
Thus, like many women artists before her, Miranda carved out increasingly larger spaces in which to express her intelligence and sensitivity: she painted wonderful flowers, landscapes, portraits and female nudes, perhaps to deeply investigate that feminine essence that , within herself, always tried to harmonize. He had a lyrical and elegiac sense of painting: sometimes tinged with sadness, his forms are constructed with perfectly matched colours, the design is barely suggested even in the figures, where warm tones prevail.
Miranda was an intelligent woman, with a pictorial culture that emerges in her work, guided by Francesco Rinone who she wanted as her teacher. Like many women, she dedicated herself to painting flowers, rediscovering in them that beauty and fragility that were specific to her, she considered them almost creatures similar to her and, recovering that sense of vanitas that she sometimes felt in her own life, she covered them with sumptuous colors always so perfectly calibrated as to deceive us, to make us think of joyful vital gardens and not of triumphs gathered a moment before decaying.
The flowers tell us about her life, they offer small glimpses of her home, a domestic world in which she wanted to excel by participating in prizes and exhibitions throughout her life, because for Miranda Magistrelli being an artist was not a choice, it was her nature that emerged also fruitful in poetry.
As with many artists, perhaps initially her nature was not fully understood, but what her family writes about her shows that she was always considered a special creature, capable of
bring joy into the lives of those who knew her, transforming her melancholic streak into a world where color and warmth, sympathy and empathy were able to prevail over pain.
“Miranda Magistrelli was a very beautiful woman, blond hair and large green eyes with which she tried to penetrate the world to understand “its painful beauty”
He was a very intelligent, well-read person with great mathematical and linguistic skills. She loved reading and liked to discuss the themes of books and novels in depth .
Painting had always been his passion; even as a child she preferred to draw and paint than play with her younger sister who didn't understand her silences or her "absence" from the world in an attempt to capture a color, a light to freeze on the paper or write a sentence or a poem, her other passion.
She was passionate, curious, eager for knowledge, friendly and empathetic, but at the bottom of her soul there was a sadness that sometimes made her withdraw into herself. He loved experimenting with different painting techniques and the subjects to be represented. He frequented the city's cultural circles and a group of painters/artists.
He participated in many local and national exhibitions, winning recognition and prizes, but he never commercialized his works because, after all, they were his creatures, his world, his therapy for facing life.”
This is what her niece Lucia writes about her, who shares her aunt's passion for art, and I, who have only known Miranda Magistrelli's works and poems, cannot help but remain fascinated and involved.
Raffaella Silbernagl, October 2016
THE MEDEA BEATRICE
Faces of women, sumptuous naked bodies, soft and tender flesh, Miranda Magistrelli was
also an interpreter of the female world. In women she looked for an ideal type with which to identify, despite being a beautiful woman, perhaps her intelligence made her feel inadequate in a world, that of post-war Italy, in which women still had a marginal role .
Perhaps this is why Miranda assembled the eyes, nose, mouths and breasts of her models to create an ideal woman, a woman who was enough for her world, who was more than she could be. The woman, fragile and strong, as the artist describes her in the poem "Maternity", has over time had two fundamental and opposite ways of being considered.
The Greek world depicted women as creatures subject to extremely passionate, primordial, uterine instincts, difficult to manage. For this reason women were relegated and protected inside their homes and could only go out on a few occasions, they were creatures of pure instinct. Medea, Deianira, Clytemnestra, the Bacchae, but also Antigone are an example of the extreme conduct of women in the Greek world, personification of a prejudice that from Macbeth onwards has spanned the centuries up to today, where women are still not only considered more weak but also hysterical and almost incapable of understanding and wanting. On the other hand, women, Dante and Manzoni are proof of this, have also been considered from the troubadour culture onwards, as bearers of order and wisdom, as those who are capable of mitigating the warlike instincts of men through sensitivity, understanding and love .
At a certain point in human history, the female world emerges from chaos and becomes the very symbol of order. So often in the world of work women are considered more collaborative and capable of alleviating conflicts, more conciliatory so to speak, even if in my experience I have not found much evidence regarding this positive "prejudice".
I have always considered this dual way of looking at the female universe extremely interesting, in reality, it is the elusiveness that becomes dualism, a contrast between opposites. Which woman can deny that she is both weak and strong, sweet and aggressive, saint and witch, chaste and sensual, order and chaos.
Ambivalence dominates the female world and Miranda Magistrelli's women are ambivalent. Sometimes voluptuous, in their challenging looks and elegant dresses, sometimes sweet painted with bouquets of flowers: the feminine mystery did not escape the artist who experienced some dramatic aspects of it such as extreme melancholy, the ability to experience emotions that
overwhelmed her, and which caused her great suffering, yet in her texts, in her paintings, we find the beauty of the small daily moments linked to flowers, landscapes and taking care of the house while her emotions flowed like music in abstract paintings, emotional moments and dreamlike.
The women she painted were many, models for herself, a woman who felt fragile but who had the strength to resist sadness for an entire life, a woman who painted women to find her self in a world she didn't recognize never a role suited to his intelligence and sensitivity. Miranda lived out of her time,
perhaps this is why he wanted to consign so many images of women to history. To close, I like to quote his verses...
Raffaella Silbernagl, 8 March 2017