REGGIO EMILIA.- Luisa Rabbia’s exhibition, Love, features a corpus of ten artworks realized between 2009 and 2017, all acquired by the Collezione Maramotti, which has been following the artist’s research for several years.

Love includes works on paper and on canvas – representing a significant transition in the artist’s work from drawing to painting – an artist’s book, and an important site-specific work realized directly on the walls of the Collezione during Rabbia’s residence. The title of the exhibition is taken from a large painting exhibited here for the first time, which is a part of the trilogy Love-BirthDeath, her latest major project. A catalogue has been published to accompany the exhibition with an essay by Mario Diacono.

In her work Rabbia reflects on the existential condition, the connection between human beings and their environment. Her works evoke web-like membranes made of delicate markings that co-exist with abrupt breaks and amputations made with decisive lines, and with fingerprints that lead us into the heart of a nebula, a fluid and organic structure that is both intimate and social.

The artist’s use of blue cites interior worlds, blood in veins or sap running in deep roots. But blue is also the color of a universal skin, stretched out until it becomes a thin and fragile landscape.

Fingerprints, repeated over vast surfaces, confer and reinforce a movement, an ever-shifting, roving physical energy within the work itself, and a physical connection with the paint. They evoke a humanity unclassified by gender or ethnicity, but one made up of a multiplicity of singularities. Like cells in the body or human traces, the fingerprints invite the observer to look for parallels between interior and exterior landscapes, between personal histories and memories, and those that are collective.

Luisa Rabbia's practice, rooted in drawing and realized in colored pencil, is capable of constructing instinctive narratives. The fluidity of her line within the space of the canvas or paper sustains the rhythm of her creation through an accumulation of marks capable of bringing us to a dimension that goes beyond time, into a perspective of infinite growth.

Born in Pinerolo, Italy, in 1970, Luisa Rabbia studied at the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti in Turin. Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY since 2000.