FEDERICA DUBBINI PHILOSOPHY

 

 

1976. That’s when Genova gave birth to me. The land and sea of Liguria welcomed me for 27 years; then I moved first to Milan, where I stayed a few years as part of my education and work experience, and in 2008 to Switzerland, and precisely to Bellinzona, in the Ticino canton.

I was born in Genova, that’s true, but my origins are diversified and far away. And this fragmented condition, this contamination of different roots and people, that’s what I have been bringing with me ever since. The deep and intimate feeling of not really belonging to any place or community, and yet finding myself in such a true and direct communion.

 

In the beginning this way of being, not so much and not only connected with my physical and geographical movements but with my mental status, made me a bit uncomfortable. As soon as I accepted that I could be a gypsy in the world, wandering, floating and not belonging to any reality to the fullest, I managed to free myself from the structures and constraints of such a condition and reached the true essence of things, knowledge, relationships, places and experiences, transposing all this into art.

 

Essence. Contaminations. That’s what connotes me as a person and also as an artist, I think. As an individual and also as an artist I search for a pure, defined and radical (also according to the Italian etymology of the term, “radice”, “root”, with a defined root) character, but despite myself I end up facing a whole series of contaminations pressing me and asking to be heard and not be excluded. So this is the result: a mix of encounters, experiences, stories and colours that need to find some shape and coherence, their own place in this wide and diversified scenario, constantly running the risk of resulting exaggerated and excessively filling.

 

In this thin thread, in this abyss threatening to open any minute philosophy is what saves me, the constant search for who I am, the daily and infinite discovery of my inner world and of how it may be able to find some sort of balance with the outer world.

This is my place of research, the ground on which I feel these contrasts may find not a solution but some healthy confrontation and dialogue, becoming a language that is never unique and one-way but always dichotomous; very often the search is left open and questions are left unanswered, accepting that unavoidable portion of unsolved and incomplete as a symbol of existence and of the work of art itself.

“Woe betide the painting that presents nothing beyond the finite world! The value of a painting is what is indefinable about it: exactly the quality that escapes precise ideas”, Delacroix wrote down in his diary, and right this is the rugged path to go along, the never-ending challenge of fixing on canvas that something which seems so intangible and elusive when you speak of it.

 

It is the search for transcendence, for the noumenon, for everything existing beyond and regardless of us and that as such gives rise to everything, to our thoughts and to our way of conceiving and feeling the world.

 

Yves Klein claimed that “All colours arouse specific associative ideas, psychologically material or tangible”: according to him only blue was in actual, visible nature what is most abstract.

But here colours and matter serve to investigate what is difficult to even put in words, what is elusive, that portion of a dream which remains attached to you like a passing feeling, without being able to give it a name, substance or shape. I’m not searching for what I see or what is easy to depict: what I am interested in is the journey, a journey in conscience and in everything that’s dark, deep and that tries to emerge and tell itself from the unconscious. It is the transition from an imperceptible dream to a vivid wakefulness, a subtle and impalpable transition, the perception of a few moments.

 

Nature is a daily and objective gift of beauty and splendour showing off. I pretend to try and take my personal picture of what remains hidden, of something that can neither be objective nor objectifiable in its representation, and herein also lies its appeal, mystery and ambiguity. This doesn’t mean that I want to give up aesthetic beauty, the balance of colours and the three-dimensional interplay of shapes and relief. But I always try to search for often unlikely and clashing matches,

 

provocative sometimes, as are the shades colouring past experiences and memories fixed on canvas. I like to think that, the same way as our mind oscillates and wanders from the present to the past and to the future, the eye may lose itself in these mixtures, penetrate the darkness of mind and memories, dream and imagine worlds.