Reviews

Daniela Domenichini is experiencing a particularly creative and artistically motivated season. Her recent choices implying a theoretical and cultural expansion of both expressive and material research have, in a positive way, given birth to a new artistic output.
Her natural knack for figurative art, with those delicate impressionist accents, once used to aim at expressing the image not as a copy, or mirror, of a representative reality, but rather as compositional rapture trying to re-enact the suggestions and assonances of the love game, and the moments of a timeless everyday life: the mystery of life flowing.
Her refined experience involved additional artistic languages and technical modalities.
Here’s how Daniela Domenichini sums up her new production: “I have got rid of the paintbrush and have chosen to work directly with metallic materials.  I turn delicate silk works into solid sculptures imprisoned inside resin, while paper incisions become “something else”, unveiled as they are through their “alter ego” of solid plexiglas.
It’s a challenge, an assessment of expressive potentialities unchained from the rigid outlines imposed by certain artistic / ideological mindsets. It’s about being free to “try”, to experiment with new solutions and to match the imaginative moment to the creative-artistic act.
Composing through manipulation of natural or artificial materials (from copper to lead to plexiglas) is indeed a way to retrieve one’s own expressive nature and sense of communication, rather than an attempt to “characterize” oneself.
The suitable choice of materials and matter blended with colours imbues her compositions with spirituality, which unites the outer and the inner dimension. This entails discovering the parallel between feeling and acting, thinking and acting, desire and experimentation.
The artist Daniela Domenichini does not bear witness to “becoming” in art, as she is a delicate and energetic interpret of a variety of linguistic-communicative expressions. This awareness prevents her from being a mould of herself in her production, at the same time as allowing her to divergently express what can highlight her own “aesthetic model” when experiencing the real world.
A real world often made up of small things, of objects pertaining to both the practical and the intimate daily life, of things abandoned and devoid of life. A new creative course unfolds along this unseen world, offering Daniela Domenichini an invaluable opportunity to materialize a “psychological sight”, i.e. the images of forgotten objects reflected like memory in our subconscious mind.
"The object expands further than the limits of its own appearance, since we know that a thing is well beyond anything its aspect reveals in front of our eyes". (P. Klee )

Emotion is the keyword wrapping Daniela Domenichini’s artistic research around lyrical notes. An artist from Bologna with brilliant mnemonic-visual skills, her enigmatic works seal her knowledge of history together with the extemporaneous nature of daily life, thus paving the way to the future with  semantic audacity, gestural passion  and an outstanding creative inspiration.
Her composition plots can trigger an unparalleled emotional magma in the night of life: light is beyond her being, inside her soul, spelled by tranquil rhythms and surprisingly charming ancestral melodies. Love, suffering and nostalgia become sensual metaphors of life experience, disguised under the curtain of her inner soul.

Like an actor on the stage of existence, human ingenuity spills its potential onto the  archaeological zones of our mind. Matter is the vehicle for this subliminal communication; alive and mutable, it moves in the basement of  human imagination, by leaving either dirty traces of the past, or  spiritual testimonies when listening to our soul.
An imposing silence, vibrant with expected sounds, rises as a tragic glimpse of consciousness. Here lies her escape from reality. Here, the existential sob of a tenacious and deep artist in front of her own creations is hiding.
The fusion between painting and sculptural art achieved by Daniela Domenichini shows the beat of senses in the whisper of time, and reveals the mysteries of the soul under an essentially cathartic pressure. This is indeed the impelling drive that can be seen in her poignant aesthetic research.
An introspective journey is accompanied by new light when the visual interplay between frequent grooves, thicknesses, wrinkles and smooth surfaces becomes a metaphysical emblem for the concepts of absence and presence, as well as a hypothetical comparison between self and other. Chromaticism erases the temporal dimension to suggest an extension that is  "other", reaching out beyond the threshold of the 'possible'. Behind these lie the paths of our psyche.

"... I like it, I’m fond of your reds and of that very force I decided to shade in my own work. You scream, but perhaps there’s no difference between us. There’s no hypocrisy in your individual search for art; the harmony radiating from your artwork can only originate from genuine research. It’s not my language, but you are fluent in it; there are hidden corners, passages, varied techniques that coexist through a mutual exaltation…"
 

If there’s one thing reflecting someone’s worth more than anything else, that’s their willingness to question themselves. Her determined face, her lively glance lit by light-coloured and very vivacious eyes, are the most authentic expression of a curious woman who is voracious in her appetites and throws herself in when something strikes her imagery, provided it’s endowed with even the slightest imperceptible form of beauty. Beauty is indeed Daniela’s main source of search, especially at this stage of her life.
Despite her scientific background, she decided to take up a new chapter of her life by graduating from the Accademia delle Belle Arti; her work was informed by heartfelt passion and eagerness, as one can see from her portraits reproducing a refined pictorial image as well as a psychologically dissected inner side. This is, unquestionably, quality work.
She is interested – and she experiments on – a variety of materials: copper for engraving, the ephemeral lightness of silk, and ceramic. Through a chromatic modulation that is occasionally raw while sometimes solar and dazzling, her works reveal her eagerness to deal with reality, and the essential key to her soul: never take things for granted, make the most of every moment in life to probe deeper and expand your sphere of knowledge. Her life takes her to more in-depth humanistic and intellectual research, as a basis for a more intense and mature effort, with added emphasis on the materials, in an informal attempt that might even come across as ancient; a very successful alliance that releases a powerful energy.
This is Daniela Domenichini as I know her: sweet and romantically inspired in her portraits, dense and full-bodied in the colours she juxtaposes on the variety of materials – including the most traditional ones – and indissolubly open to experimentation with the  freshness of an adolescent.

Why these lines? Simply to add to an effort involving several people who think very highly of you.
In the Academy, your research produced a worthy outcome in your very personal techniques, and then in the critical analysis of language. Day after day your artwork has developed into autonomous 'poetics", very relevant to the meanings examined.
Shapeless and shaped form, where colours naturally highlight the energy of the matter.
These words make me think of a sort of "archaeology of sight", linguistic references that touch but are not limited to the wider ‘informal art’ phenomenon, which is still lively in Bologna these days and still attracts the younger artists.
It’s something that perhaps goes ‘beyond’, quite rightly as it is set in the 21 st  century.
The birth of artwork is intertwined with its conception: a magic moment where ‘another’ time meets the artist’s space.                                          
Your awareness of physics leads you to investigate the nature of materials, in order to strip them bare and to look for things nature hides from our sight. The artist, Daniela Domenichini, freezes her eye to observe the earth’s micro-shapes and to be able to construct an alphabet recognizable by man’s sight.
The earth: celebrated by contemporary and past artists, as a time-honoured and generous source of inspiration, simple and complex at the same time and always different.
Just like Art shows the mother earth in infinite ways, your work, Daniela, shows  a singular vision of earth: matter, energy, light and colour create a powerful idea of it. Food for our spirit and our material life, where the appearance of the artist-human being leaves behind traces that cannot but be the product of art.

 

I like what I see, it makes my thoughts crumble and I smile.
I relate what I don’t see and perceive to the second principle of thermodynamics and all this enthuses me. I solemnly restart chewing my nails, just like Julius Caesar and Napoleon.