Sara Enrico
Sara Enrico is an Italian artist from Turin, born in 1979, After graduating in Decoration at the Fine Art Academy of her native city, she studied Painting Restoration at the Spinelli Institute in Florence. Her works are based on a deep, artistic analysis of the painting, not only on its semantics but also from a structural and physical perspective. She combines art and handcraft.
Artworks like RGB (Skin) and Untitled (Jacquard) are born from scanning a white painting, after that Sara recombines the scans by computer graphics and prints them on a synthetic canvas. She creates a paper pattern with a strong connection with fashion paper patterns. In Untitled (Jacquard) the same canvas was scanned and digitally printed on a woven made by a "Jacquard", a loom widely considered the precursor of modern machinery.
I found a different kind of medium in your artistic research. Why? What make your work so different from each other?
I focus on the idea of transition thorough my handling with materials, from those used for painting to some more industrial. The work often develops out of an activity of casting, of addiction and reduction, placement and replacement. Let's say, it may be a constellation of marks and experiences. I'm very interested on the declination of materials and processes I use in order to follow and open suggestions and narrations throughout the surface itself, which becomes sort of clue of a broader meanings. Surfaces have a hidden narrative tension, which lead the gaze toward the tactile perception, keeping and mixing up memories or coming visions of worlds and atmospheres.
I find really interesting your scanner artwork. Can you talk about them?
I found the scanner a good tool for making casts. Its own properties allowed me to work with surfaces in different way. I like to think about it as a chance to perform a material and to explore its sculptural features. The series RGB, in particular, are scans from a clipping canvas shifted and folded within the rhythm of the light's motion. In other works, such as RGB (skin), the patterns are obtained from the interaction of the white of the canvas and the light. They show designs and cuts, a sort of paper models to be sew, or just found there, laying on a bar or waiting to be finished.
Can we say that your artistic research focus in the features of working materials? Do you think you will find a definitive medium?
And also in the meaning of using certain materials. In this sense, I guess it's not a question of finding a definitive medium, even thus I've been working a lot with the materials of paint. We can rather shift the question towards which kind of sensitivity I want to deal with.
Does the artistic inputs came from a personal experience or do you prefer let opera growth process takes life from the working progress?
Actually, I find difficult to split these two dimensions. They're both present!
Interview by Alice Manieri
Courtesy of Sara Enrico
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