At the SpazioQuattro art gallery in Messina we find “Realtà Sospese” (Suspended Realities), with the sculptures by Sara Teresano,
Her works talk of a long reflection on universal life, without making distinctions between categories of beings, without looking for an epilogue or a reason that justifies the succession of generations.
The artist, absolutely self-taught in terms of artistic training, is Sicilian – from Messina – and a biologist. She is a mother and at the same time a daughter of the Mediterranean, imbued with classical echoes and gifted with an admirable ability to relate to the substantiality of sculpting or modeling. She has a scientific gaze, a secular sensitivity and an introspective force that allows her to dialogue with the deep layers of her own emotions.
Sara Teresano said of herself: “I am someone who continues to cultivate her dreams, because I think only dreams are true. I do it to purge myself of reality. ” Her dreams, of course, do not represent a dream world, but an open door to the philosophical path of self-awareness: the Socratic know- yourself. It is a truthful knowledge because it is internal, supported by scientific study that allows to retrace, in the opposite direction, the bumpy and wonderful path of evolution. The artist seeks in his own heart to free himself from the transitory that encrusts it: purifying oneself, that is, purifying oneself.
From the female form, that is, from being the creator and container of life, Sara Teresano develops her own aesthetics, made of reassuring volumes that want to hold their place without contaminating themselves, enclosing in their being the mystery, aqueous and lunar, of cosmic becoming. Whether they are women’s bodies, spores, sponges, pollen grains, seeds or drupes, it is a systematic reflection on the ability to be the cradle of life. The dominating, absolutist and warrior gesture does not belong to her: it is not a question of femininity but of attention; Sara Teresano feels the almost ineffable pulse of germination. She does not like to list, divide, reason by categories: she tries instead to amplify the miracle of growth, in whatever being this happens.
The critic Maria Froncillo Nicosia underlines her inclination to “present, through bizarre inventions, the material expression of gravity and a natural power.” This is the other aspect of this artist from Messina: her physical relationship with the substantiality of sculpting. Sara Teresano poses as a generator of what is inanimate, blowing the emotion of life into it. We have already mentioned self-awareness, the door that opens the mind’s eyes to the deep and dizzying roots of our identity. She, aware of the geological origin of each stone collected in her studio, looks for the contact point between the suggestion of the raw material and the imaginary of shapes that she carries inside.
In her long and creative parable, she used very different materials: from soft clay of terracotta to porous travertine, from alabaster- so greedy for light- to the silky compactness of sandstone; from bronze to the wooden planes taken from the sea -which she lets dry until the salt crystals flourish. Sometimes she allows a veil of wax to dribble and spread over the terracotta. Her materials are always silent, inert, they come from the depths of time. Incidentally they suggest a shape and sculpting becomes that suggestion, working according to organic principles, like an embryo that turns into a foetus.
It is the same generating principle that leads the sculptor to suggest – not represent – the implicit possibility of evolving and changing the inanimate into a work of art. In the same way, “the Earth’s soul – explains the artist – and its memory are enclosed in fragments of materials, or in a seed. A spore where all happens. Opposite to the sky, the earth represents the beginning, the duration, the density, it is Dèmetra- the mother of ancient Greece-, it supports and gives life even in extreme conditions “.
From the seed to the maternal womb, every living thing capable of generating is in the abstract form, an egg: at the same time fragile, protective, essential to life and a primordial universe for heartbeat and breath, who-within it- take shape.
This is why Sara Teresano’s female figures are not bodies but universes: “they are opulent women – explains the artist – they flaunt their shapes regardless of the eye that observes them. With the expansion of their volume, their interiority grows. “
Art thus becomes the point of contact between the inanimate and the miracle of life.
By Massimiliano Reggiani
in cooperation with Monica Cerrito
