Observing art from the point of view of the artist, today we find always less its functional and evident role declared in the form of specific activity, filtering from this highly cultural category according which he has traditionally declined to do. Artists dedicated to forms of painting, sculpture, installation seem to put always more often their art outside of definable schemes, like activities that seem to us more accessible and near to be their outcome of an attitude of adhesion and integration to a sort of daily existence. Monica De Mitri belongs to this attendance of somewhat ‘familiarity’ of art, with an approachable access and customary substantial knowledge. As an artist who with clear critical vision of the historical anthropological conditions of the present she doesn’t pretend to make herself a bearer of higher values, of higher themes of revolutionary ideals or of a central redemption of the artistic ability, she considers it rather as an integrated activity between the others that connote her feelings, her attitudes, her way of being and daily life, in relation to which she makes comprehensìble, with which she maintains the most vital contacts and acquires her particular and specific character. Interests which stem from her artistic training, the activity in the world of fashion, in scenography and as choreographic costumist, show also the fundamental components and multiple characters of an art which is born from her life, which follows her inclinations, which adheres to a perfectly fitting existence and for this is difficult to classify and escapes traditional distinction. Her work is not painting nor sculpture nor object nor installation in the true sense; from time to time these categories could be presented as possibilities or potentialities of her work, prevailing one or the other; deriving not only from the total separation, from filters of a traditionally artistic culture but directly from the idea of a minute, patient work, almost excellence and researched manufacture, on its own made of apparently simple statement, sometimes even conceptually minimal and mentally concentrated in an essential gesture almost Zen-like. A work which clearly demonstrates the process and explicitly declares it; a creation of colour, of ink but also of scissors, glue, paper simply painted or adorned with paper ribbons or with glued on gauze, with overlaid foil or gold leaf and drops of glass or fragments of colored crystal redeeming the simplicity of these materials and mimicking fabric or evoking decorative elements, finishing touches, jewels of far ethnic echoes, fashion world but all on a grand scale, transparent paper fragments tied together ceiling to make scenographic wings or the large strips which support long plaited cascades of little together with fine metal wire. found in fashion archeology, but when for example fragments of or with motives of squares in ascending supremacy or like monochrome tables composed according to the geometry of abstract and constructive memory but altogether having an air temporary and contingency. This work itself a small discovery, a twig, a metallic shred, a drop of crystal to make a sort of precious relic, or together create a support for elements hung or stuck to each other interchanging roles becoming now elements binding now supporting the work. They are gestures which implicate other gestures, in fact, they derive from it, are a consequence of it so that the final work is only a part of it, phases of a longer process which has moments before the creation and successive reoccurrences. It’s as if the artist wants us to perceive the fine pleasure of her initial searching, finding, assembly, conservation, custody and wants then wants to give a time and a place to that which is temporary and ephemeral, to that which has been discarded and recovered.... transformed in the urgency of halting and defìning each thin and small emotion sensitive also to materials of little value of her discovery. From these therefore attentive to inclinations to reveal and fix upon a hidden beauty maintaining all the while the sense of a dynamic contingent above all in those of paper hung as provisionally leaning against the wall or in those areas and almost precarious compositions of fragments of painting or in the free and potentially changeable composition of the broken tables that seem to find only momentary equilibrium, held together by unifying elements of wires which run the length and descend from above as if accidentally hung or like those small fragments of cut paper recomposed on the surface, almost ready to change configuration or scatter with every breeze. In every work where the idea of composition, of the centrality of geometric order seems to sub-enter, a sort of inclination or better still constructive evocation, this is contradicted by the style, by the way, it’s done. Even the memory the ascent taken from the various stylistic temperatures brought into play, appears more as a retro suggestion, dictated by the materials found always different. It is the latter which creates fine, sensitive emotions, suggesting their way of being using from within each single work determining the morphology its peculiar character. The things have a soul which seems to have been suggested by De Mitri, the artist is only an instrument which allows it to emerge. That which pauses between a sort of sentiment of the material and like a deep thought, that of a diffused aesthetic which rediscovers even in the tiniest and apparent negligible things that surround us. Her works stimulate our capacity of trying the sensuality of the materials almost through a tactile as well as a vision of a more sensitive affinity and in keeping with a perception of the finest shades. All this reflects in works in which the sense of ‘precious’ and ‘poor’ co-exist, the ‘high’ and the ‘low’ live together in evocation and go from the present, from the flavour of things to the re-interpretation of painting methods which from time to time the opera suggests: perhaps an informal abstraction, pictorial sign automatism, minimalist geometry, stylistic numbers fully re-lived as material objects. And so becomes a sign, painting that becomes a thing; at the end the work moves within to this dialectal ambiguity so much as to say that the things themselves or better the fragments of things are presented as stylistic motifs and suggesting the shape of the work. A sort or ready-made artistic, a sort of discovered art, implicit within the materials and their natural or artificial form, the artist supports it according to a sensitive thought in which the interference, the inter-relations, the contaminations of culture and nature, fashion and memory temporary or permanent, casual and intentional are intertwined as fact in her works, their warp and weft.
