Icons without history - a dance between matter and light
Siena, 2022
The residency at the Art Institute of Siena (Italy, 2022) is an opportunity for Angerami to deepen her artistic research by developing the series Icons without historia. The process of elaboration of this work evolves by combining images of a powerful nature, experienced by the artist in Brazil, with the iconography and techniques of medieval and Renaissance painting, observed live in Italy.
Angerami evokes Christian icons that recount the events of sacred texts in frescoes and ancient paintings, in a simple way: that of visual narration. However, he transposes the spell of sacred images into the context of the living world, that of birds. Those who inhabit the connecting space between earth and heaven become the symbol of this sacralization.
The coronation does not allude to the veneration of a god, elevated and separate from man. On the contrary, the eyes of the birds, turned directly towards the spectator, seem to question him, to ask him for respect, a sign of gratitude for this system of cosmic connections, of which humanity is only a small fragment, an ephemeral parenthesis in the cycle of life.
If the use of gold that surrounds the birds elevates the images to the divine dimension, it also constitutes a material element, a fragment of cosmic matter derived from the explosion of stars, millions of years ago. Thus, this luminosity of the gold that emerges from it carries in the painting a materiality that goes beyond our time. The artist dances between matter and light.
These icons don't evoke a narrative, they don't have a story to tell. Most birds appear against a background without representation, they are not contextualized in a landscape - but the complexity of the landscapes is transposed and condensed in the multiple facets of their iridescent feathers. The infinite diversity of the landscapes, which range from the tiny strips o grass to the immensity of the sky, from the softness of a feather moved by the wind, to the light touch of clouds that slide quickly on the horizon, everything is integrated in the overlapping of pictorial strata that Angerami brings to until then. These icons don't evoke a narrative, they don't have a story to tell. They are timeless icons. Because time does not exist, there is only the existent that infinitely changes and transforms into another existent.
In a process of progressive elaboration, Angerami visibly immerses himself in the environment that surrounds him, seeking to condense in her work the spirituality and vitality of an ancestral nature. A sensitive approach, where the delicate touch of the brush represents the last passage of a vortex of energies that animate the cosmos and, passing through the body and soul of the artist, materialize in the material of the painting.