If ever an exhibition can show an artistic course that hardly outlines and then luminously unravels parallel to a human course, well, the one of painter Anna Maria Orsi Barbaglia can do that. But who is the painter? Just a few facts.
Orsi was born in Piacenza and lives at Invorio. Of the land she comes from, Emilia, Orsi incarnates the dense and immediate joviality that lures you into the span of a brilliant fluency that spices life up with subtle humour and makes it a dimension worthy of being savoured. And of the people of Emilia she still echoes and expresses - filtered and brightened by an intense social and humanitarian experience- the artistic interests, which in her case spread from the study of singing and piano, ceramics, drawing, all the way to painting. And of the people from Massina - where during evacuation she spent her childhood at her grandmother's house- she conveys a strong willed tenacity that goes to the extent of stubbornness for anything representing for her a reason for life and encounter. And of that "hamlet of herbs and castles" still images teem in her of spring, chestnuts feast, the emotion of vine leaves in the hours of grape harvest, the change of colour of the wood at twilight. And then the warmth of stables, the migration of swallows the sweet last roses".
In June 1983 her first personal exhibition in the wonderful setting of palazzo Bossi in Orta San Giulio. The second one in Arona, 1984, in via Matteotti. In June '88 the Painter is back at Orta, with a presence of artworks increasing in number and varying in the subjects, even if they all wind around the pentagram of nature. Orsi is noticed in the region area and beyond, accurate reviews appear on local and national papers and on art publications, and a few artworks are published on national magazines to illustrate novels. From America a request is made to illustrate a biblical work. The 4th exhibition is organized at Arona, in via Monte Pasubio. The latest one was at the Palazzo dei Congressi di Arona, in June 2001. Anyway, what is art and what is Orsi's art? And which are the subjects? The nature and the colour to narrate it are for her the inseparable duo: often a successful duo. It's her logo and also her secret. After all, the Painter has colour running in her blood as a gift derived from ancestral remoteness. Of colour, in fact, she captures first of all the aspect of combination, suggestion, description. While emotion drives her, always vibrating, sometimes fierce. Also, beyond colour, in Orsi's blood runs, again and jointly, the soft plasticity of volumes that over time emerge to compose ethereal harmonies of shapes until becoming weightlessness of dance, sortilege of music: that is, a kind of painting just on the brink of magic. In a rigorous parallelism with life. Colour to narrate nature that for her is materical substance that nourishes glances and remembrances, childhood and future, a pretext but already a landing, at least dreamt of, an implicit answer to questions without words. Endless emotion.
If these are her art's matter and shape, what kind of painting is that of Anna Maria Orsi Barbaglia? The definitions are not easy since the Painter is out of any school, beyond any trend , on top of any fashion, a pure self-taught artist, just like Ligabue was together with dozens of other celebrities.
We could say, in an attempt to simplify, that her naturalism is impressionistic. But we might just have approximated reality rounding it down. There have been three appointments-messages of painter Orsi Battaglia. She started with fierce and passionate "natures" where "palettes" trespass you as sharp as sun without veils: and they were glorious autumn and sunset woods; and seascapes and skies narrating the storm of elements as an explosion of life.
Then, all the more frequently, emerged the totally immaterial texture of some trees plunged in the chastity of the early dawn; the sinuous flow of rivers pacified between the shivering banks of the spring; a meditative and almost mystical hour at the edge of the day and of the seasons. Whereas the subjects were proposed as a precious monochromatic watermark -be it silver, blue or lilac- that releases from any burden and narrates poetical things as whisperings that trespass mystery. Now comes a narration of allusions and references developed into a language of immediate but not exhaustive understanding, since, in actual fact, metaphors are there. There are the "here" and "now", but together with the omen of remote torments to come, of hidden bends where remembrance and miracles lay down. Most of all, there is a search of interiority that does not linger in aestheticisms that are an end in themselves but sings life and its mystery, the encounter and the communion, the certainties for which everything fills up with meaning. Describing them means talking of flowers scattered by angels' hands, horizons wounded by sudden certainties, ethereal figures rather supposed that seen, real, maybe, just inside you, in a continuity that denies nothing and perfects all. Together with the entire chromatic array that migrates from woods' russet to the changing colour of the grassland, to the hilarious dazzling of the early snow, to be finally delivered in the overflowing vitality of August sunflowers in an urgent concatenation of beauty. To the extent that you stop bewildered by the Painter's consonance with pacifying rhythms of nature, with the quiet flowing of time, with the changeability of its hours until the perpetual emerging of "other" proposals, as new as life is. Bewilderment like fascination but also curiosity that captures you because it's an invitation and a help to find that interior dimension to which, even if not always consciously, you want to return to retrieve a harmony lost at times.
So, one can agree, that the oil paintings of Anna Maria Orsi Battaglia, as they bring to light truths often reserved to the poet and the mystic, urge you to search a "next world" that is mystery, but a joyful mystery.
That mystery unfathomable that is beyond the barrier of time, of place, of heart.