MASSIMO DURANTI – 1 december 1979
In her business card Giovanna Bruschi wrote: “Art is love”, a challenging, engaging definition that is definitely in tune with her way of interpreting art. The process of engraving has very few secrets for her, even if she has never abandoned a fussy and exhausting research on techniques and materials. Bruschi’s etchings are in fact perfect, clean in every detail. But it would be insufficient to emphasize only the technical aspect, although it required years of hard work under masters such as Diego Donati. The contents, particularly the poetry, which Bruschi expresses in her works, lend themselves to at least two interpretations. On the one hand, the ability and ease of realistically portraying nature that lead her to create compositions of remarkable immediate effect, woven with net chiaroscuro which emanates from textures of precise yet impalpable signs. When instead the artist expresses feelings, moods, or wishes to make a statement, the traditional figurative approach is progressively abandoned, or better yet, synthesized, amalgamated in a sort of very elaborated palimpsest, made of lights and sudden shadows, bordering on the surreal. There is no longer a description, but a rendering of dreams, memories or hidden liberating aspirations. It is this second aspect that characterizes her work, which expresses a substantial and original creativity. In “vortex” (1979) the sense of depth that etching can usually give is hardly striking; it is a sensation that involves the natural element in the foreground, deformed by an occult and violent force. The dream is indicated by the cropping of the image which in reality is a very clever and discontinuous blur of ideal margins.
