Images Without any Filter

Daniele Capra
on the occasion of the exhibition
Nenehno Gibanje / Movimento incessante/ Unceasing Motion
Mestna Galerija NG, Nova Gorica, Slovenia, 2026

A Cosmos Within a Studio

Arianna Ellero’s works take shape from an inner necessity to act and from her daily dialogue with the pieces in her studio — a space that serves simultaneously as a site of action, a place of meditation, and a refuge from the intrusions of the outside world. Yet first and foremost, it is an altogether singular place, where only what the artist wishes to happen is allowed to occur: it is her realm and her universe, built by her own hand and one by which she is, in turn, partly shaped. In that context, Ellero is the only subject capable of expressing a will and of imposing her own order absolutely. At the same time, the studio is also a refuge that attracts and protects the artist, a space of self-therapy and dialogue where the works come into being — that is, as all the possible projections of her identity. With them she can establish a free and sincere dialogue, without any limit in time and without fear of changing her mind or contradicting herself. Her studio is a laboratory of the possible, a territory in which the works grow and continue to be transformed until they reach a state of autonomy from the artist, like daughters now mature and independent. Yet there remains a visceral and personal relationship with each of them, a sense of belonging, unity and kinship out of the ordinary. Each work, inevitably, carries a part of the artist; it is a fragment of a personal cosmos which, like the one in which we live, is in continuous and whirling expansion.

On Pure Painting

The post-industrial spaces in which Ellero works are physically dominated by light and by the presence of the Friulian countryside, which enters in fragments through the glazed windows. Yet all this seems not to resonate directly within her work, for it is reasonable to imagine that the artist looks out towards the fields only during the pauses between one working session and the next. Her works, in fact, arise from a daily confrontation with the canvas — a face-to-face challenge in which it is essential to concentrate the gaze on the surface. Ellero’s practice is founded on bringing about ‘pictorial events’ that then leave a trace upon the surface in a stable and complete form, no longer requiring modification or addition. The central element of her work deals with setting the forces at play into interaction, mixing them, layering them and, after continual changes, allowing them to settle definitively, thus creating self-sufficient structures of meaning. Her method is selective and centripetal, as it condenses attention almost exclusively upon colour and gesture, prompting the setting aside of all other aspects. In her studio, in fact, nothing occurs other than ‘pure painting’, while all other phenomena are inevitably transient and destined to pass unnoticed.

Painting as Seismograph

Ellero’s paintings originate in an intense psychic necessity and in a strong impulse towards confrontation with the other and towards action, which the painter channels into the work. Yet nothing she brings about on the canvas is directly traceable to reality as we know it. The artist does not extract or distil large or small portions of the visible familiar to us; rather, through a sincere, honest and craftsmanlike daily process, she transcribes a further reality that she perceives and that can be known only through her. Her works form a kind of emotional story, yet there is no description, no direct narration, no characters. Everything unfolds through a transposition into an aniconic expressive language, in which the image freely corresponds to nothing other than itself; at the same time, it answers only to its own internal logic, explored and then shaped by the artist in her studio. In Ellero’s practice, the painting can thus be imagined as a seismograph that traces and accurately records a particular psychological condition. This occurred in the past during live public performative sessions, in which the artist created painterly transcriptions based on music; and it also happens in her more recent work, in the calm of her studio, when introspection arises from the wide tranquility of solitude.

Processes and Nakedness

Ellero’s research can be traced to abstract grammars of a processual and informal origin, which stem from a profound sensitivity to chromatic matter — a quality also evidenced by the fact that the artist prepares her own colours from pigments in order to realise her paintings. The central element of her practice is the very act of painting itself: the execution of brushstrokes, the creation of chromatic textures and the layering of levels form part of the content with which the artist invites us to engage. Colour is employed instinctively, serving to suggest to the viewer a particular emotional condition. Through the mediation of colour and technique, the expressive content becomes broad and polysemic, all the more so because it is not addressed to the viewer in a direct or declarative manner, but as an open question intended to prompt a personal response. The viewer is invited to confront the painting directly, in the first person and without any filter — without linguistic barriers or limits imposed by figurative imaginaries. Painting and observer stand before one another, looking at one another, both candidly naked.

Immagini senza alcun filtro – Daniele Capra, Italian version

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Vite di luce e di colore

Chiara Tavella
on the occasion of the exhibition
In Search of Friction. Painting Precedes Form
In cerca di attrito. La pittura precede la forma.
Casa Furlan – Fondazione Ado Furlan, Pordenone, Italy, 2026

ITALIANO

In cerca di attrito, la pittura precede la forma: è attenzione, processo e attraversamento

Arianna Ellero

– Senti?

E io sento: il cinguettio di qualche passero, un brusio di vento, il sottofondo del traffico dell’autostrada, che dista qualche centinaio di metri dallo studio di Arianna ed è come un basso continuo ma leggero, quasi impercettibile, sul quale si sovrappongono i pochi rumori di questo lembo di campagna, nella bassa friulana. Più volte, durante la visita al suo studio, Arianna mi invita a “sentire”. Il primo elemento che mentalmente registro è quindi questo SILENZIO, un silenzio denso di tanti minimi suoni.

Il secondo elemento è la LUCE: lo studio di Arianna, una struttura industriale dismessa, con grandi vetrate aperte sui campi, è inondato di luce – almeno il giorno della visita, che era già di primavera. Una luce che, interagendo con i pigmenti di varia origine di cui sono composti i suoi lavori, li modifica di continuo, li fa vivere diverse vite.

Terzo elemento che mi colpisce: Arianna parla dei suoi quadri come se fossero suoi FIGLI, vuole che “vadano fuori di casa”, che siano liberi. E li nomina, li sposta, li gira o li copre a seconda dell’emozione che in quel momento le trasmettono.

Come si tengono insieme questi aspetti?

Una serie di grandi tele realizzate nel periodo 2017-2022, antecedenti ai lavori esposti qui, ma che è bene ricordare perché ne costituisce l’antefatto, nasce in connessione con la musica: si tratta di opere pensate come “frequenze”, come una sorta di trascrizione visivo-gestuale dei suoni prodotti durante alcune performance realizzate con musicisti d’ambito sperimentale. Sono trascinamenti e sgocciolature di colore, un colore realizzato con pigmenti di natura diversa – caffè, grafite, terre… – e impastato con sabbia.

Poi, attorno al 2023, si produce un cambiamento – anticipato da alcuni quadri del 2022 che assumono il titolo seriale di Finestra su uno spazio, nei quali il gesto rallenta e fa posto ad ampi vuoti bianchi: in opere come Gelb und orange. Die Treffung (2023), in cui si contrappongono, quasi parvenze figurali, due corpose masse giallo arancio, il colore prende il sopravvento sul bianco, la materia pittorica diventa più densa, estesa e stratificata, risultato di una mescolanza delle tecniche più diverse, dall’olio allo spray, dai pastelli alle terre naturali.

Sono quadri nati non più dalla collaborazione con musicisti, ma nel silenzio dello studio. Registrano una dimensione introspettiva e meditativa e richiedono anche all’osservatore uno sguardo lento, la disposizione a immergersi e a esplorare orizzonti di colore-materia. Ed è questo l’aspetto che marca la distanza e la novità di Ellero, come di altri che praticano l’astrazione oggi, rispetto alla lezione dell’astrazione novecentesca, cui pure si potrebbe pensare: si accentua ora una connotazione che potremmo definire “esperienziale”, che modifica radicalmente sia la concezione tradizionale dell’opera che il modo di approcciarsi ad essa, dell’artista ma anche del fruitore.

La pittura è “esperienza”, è un tempo, un suono, una luce, una durata, una porzione di vita. La postura dell’artista è uno stare in ascolto, farsi sensore e tramite di ciò che accade sulla tela stessa. Per me la pittura non parte dall’immagine, ma da un tempo di osservazione e decisione che è già lavoro sulla materia. La pittura si costruisce come un campo attraversato da tensioni, in cui la materia si stratifica, si altera e si ridefinisce nel tempo, e in cui la superficie si comporta come una pelle, registrando e trattenendo ogni trasformazione senza mai stabilizzarsi in un’immagine conclusa – scrive Arianna. Quel che conta quindi non è l’opera finita ma la percezione sempre nuova che essa può generare nel momento in cui non è concepita come un prodotto concluso ma come un campo di forze in continua mutazione, sensibile a ogni accadimento circostante, che non si esaurisce nella singola immagine ma si sviluppa come un processo continuo, da una serie all’altra. Le opere funzionano come campi percettivi: il colore si espande, si rarefà, vibra. La luce non illumina, ma agisce: è parte del processo tanto quanto l’azione [...] Sono in cerca di attrito: quello che mi interessa è mantenere una superficie attiva, in cui la pittura continui a trasformarsi senza stabilizzarsi troppo presto – scrive ancora Arianna.

Anche all’osservatore, perciò, è richiesto un atteggiamento nuovo, di ascolto e quasi direi di compartecipazione empatica al divenire dell’opera: Non sono immagini da vedere frontalmente, ma lavori che richiedono distanza, tempo e presenza. Basta l’ombra di una nuvola o un punto di vista un po’ discosto, perché queste ampie tele appaiano muoversi, perché un segno scompaia o un altro invece si riveli. Ora capisco l’insistenza di Arianna nel chiedere di venirle a vedere nel suo studio, di mattina, in un giorno di sole. E quel chiamarle per nome, come se fossero esseri viventi.

Realmente vivono, questi grandi quadri-spazio, in un “qui e ora” che li determina e li ridefinisce di continuo. Come noi.

ENGLISH

Lives of Light and Colour

Chiara Tavella

In Search of Friction, Painting Precedes Form: Attention, Process and Passage

Arianna Ellero

— “Can you hear it?”

And I listen: the chirping of sparrows, the murmur of the wind, the distant sound of traffic from the motorway a few hundred metres away from Arianna’s studio. It is like a soft, almost imperceptible basso continuo, over which the sparse sounds of this corner of the Friulian countryside are layered. More than once, during my visit to her studio, Arianna invites me to “listen”. The first element I mentally register is therefore this SILENCE, a silence dense with countless tiny sounds.

The second element is LIGHT. Arianna’s studio, a former industrial building with large windows opening onto the fields, is flooded with light—at least on the day of my visit, already touched by spring. A light that, interacting with the pigments of different origins that compose her works, continually transforms them, allowing them to live different lives.

The third thing that strikes me is that Arianna speaks about her paintings as if they were her CHILDREN. She wants them to “leave home”, to be free. She names them, moves them, turns them around or covers them according to the emotions they convey to her at a given moment.

How are these aspects held together?

A series of large canvases created between 2017 and 2022—preceding the works presented here, yet important to recall as their antecedent—was born in connection with music. These paintings were conceived as “frequencies”, a kind of visual and gestural transcription of sounds produced during performances with experimental musicians. Drags and drippings of colour made from pigments of different origins—coffee, graphite, earth pigments—mixed with sand.

Then, around 2023, a shift occurred. Anticipated by a number of works from 2022 gathered under the serial title Finestra su uno spazio, where gesture slows down and gives way to broad white voids, paintings such as Gelb und orange. Die Treffung (2023), in which two dense yellow-orange masses confront one another almost like figurative apparitions, mark a new phase. Colour overtakes white and pictorial matter becomes denser, broader and more stratified, resulting from the combination of different techniques, from oil to spray paint, from pastel to natural earth pigments.

These paintings are no longer born through collaboration with musicians, but in the silence of the studio. They record an introspective and meditative dimension and require from the viewer a slow gaze, a willingness to immerse oneself and explore horizons of colour and matter.

This is what distinguishes Ellero’s work—and that of other contemporary abstract painters—from twentieth-century abstraction, to which one might be tempted to refer. A new, experiential dimension becomes central, radically changing both the traditional conception of the artwork and the way artist and viewer approach it.

Painting is experience. It is time, sound, light, duration—a fragment of life. The artist’s attitude is one of listening, becoming both sensor and medium for what happens on the canvas itself.

“For me, painting does not begin with the image, but with a time of observation and decision that is already work upon matter. Painting is constructed as a field crossed by tensions, in which matter stratifies, alters and redefines itself over time, and in which the surface behaves like a skin, recording and retaining every transformation without ever settling into a definitive image,” Arianna writes.

What matters, therefore, is not the finished work, but the ever-renewed perception it can generate when it is conceived not as a completed product but as a field of forces in constant mutation, sensitive to every surrounding event, developing continuously from one series to another.

The works function as perceptual fields. Colour expands, rarefies and vibrates. Light does not illuminate: it acts. It is part of the process as much as the gesture itself.

“I am in search of friction: what interests me is maintaining an active surface, where painting continues to transform itself without settling too early,” Arianna writes again.

A new attitude is therefore required from the viewer: one of listening and, I would almost say, empathic participation in the becoming of the work.

“These are not images to be viewed frontally, but works that require distance, time and presence. The shadow of a cloud or a slightly displaced point of view is enough for these large canvases to appear to move, for one sign to disappear and another to reveal itself.”

Now I understand Arianna’s insistence that I come to see them in her studio, in the morning, on a sunny day. And her habit of calling them by name, as though they were living beings.

Indeed, these large spatial paintings truly live, in a “here and now” that continually determines and redefines them.

Just like us.