Antonella Catini was born in Pisa. She now lives in Rome, where she obtained her degree in Architecture. She works on colour and pictorial matter composing forms and signs through a process of overlaying and fractures. She experiments with the surface of the canvas by identifying other dimensions and by exploring a parallel universe made of space, objects and places, where solid and void, inside and out, measure each other and continuously recall one another. Reality is fragmented, crumbled, decoded and interfaced through a process aiming also at inquiring the most hidden aspects of the “self”. The traces and imprints left on the canvas refer to the layering of the psyche and grow as a metaphor of contents of contemporaneity. The artist has taken part in numerous personal and collective art exhibitions in Italy and Europe.

Antonella Catini's Work…

di Philippe Daverio

Antonella Catini's pictorial work is curious and intriguing.Also it's eccentric to a certain extent too, if  it is taken into account the recent folds that the visual arts have taken. (...) Antonella Catini,  started to play in that fascinating area, where mind interacts with the gesture and the gesture becomes the sign, in a nearly countercurrent way. As if the energy research that leaks out from her performing was lucky enough to find out its own path, able to be understood by others and participated in by others. (...) The accumulation of gestures and signs of the previous generation is an experience already acquired for Antonella Catini, a starting point to make this pendulum keep going again. In fact, she plays with the gesture, vigorous or gentle, restores material substance, merging the colors.Making so far she gets to create an experimental heap which returns to have a narrative desire, through its hints. But in the meantime, the experience of the last century has settled. And when she puts  material substance on the other one, when she launches the gesture, she generates a language which returns to narrate. Meanings are perceived again. And as in spoken languages, each sign hides a second chance semantic : overlaps let guess the hidden underground layers, secrets come to the surface and the imago returns to form in a new own structure. If in the previous generation  figuration became abstract, into her cosmos the abstraction returns figurative but in a renewed dimension. Imagination is opened to the magic of seeing, just like a psychologist analyzing a Rorschach's test. The initial randomness is guided into its own becoming. Everything back to come together. And then it turns out that over the size of our daily seeing,  even the photograph sometimes returns hardly, there is a dimension of our daily existence, seemingly elusive, which becomes tangible and enduring when it takes the shape of the finished artwork. Here it can be rediscovered the function of painting, which binds one another the man of today with the one already similar to him in the ancient cave, and namely the representation of the myth, of the ritual, and perhaps sometimes of the mystery and therefore of the sacred. Antonella Catini "plays" with tools put in place by artists at times previous to her, similarily  to music composed according to the great paradigms that the counterpoint has already established. The end result is obviously the outcoming application of her talent. (...)

Catalogue "Yards, Antonella Catini" Skira Editore 2014