visioni orizzontali

in the horizontal world of edith urban’s paintings we contemplate plains and desert, and the windblown flatlands at the edge of the baltic. we imagine a solitary figure immersed in a wheatfield, where the absence of limits to our sight induces a pleasure in emptiness. in scanning from left to right, back to the left, and then again to the right, we reproduce the action of reading: landscape metamorphoses into the pages of an open book.

edith urban’s paintings are suffused with literature. those incorporated words surely contain messages, but maybe they are not by nature verbal messages. where do they come from, aside from her passionate reading? the artist explains that as she works in the studio she listens to certain radio programs, and sometimes the timbre of an actor’s voice reading a story or poetry, or a rhythm, or the fragment of an operatic lyric strikes her with such force that it ends directly in her painting. phrases in german, italian, english – respectively mother tongue, adopted language, and language of literature and cosmopolitan friendships – are selected with extreme if enigmatic care, and allude to an inner life which seeks both expression and concealment.  

printed in ink on paper, bruce comens’s »psyche says« and kafka’s »auf der galerie« have only the most fragile physical existence, but the artist wants to give words a tactile presence. She scratches sentence fragments into a rough matrix suggestive of the italic textures of volcanic ash, tufa, cement, and plaster, and then employs the earthy and sensuous palette of pompeian wall painting. she seems to use this insistent materiality as a foil in order to underline the metaphysical, imaginary nature of both literature and pictures.

edith urban’s work is a gathering of fragments and a layering of realities, not in the romantic sense of commemorating a decayed, lost world, but rather as a way to express her sense of simultaneity, which is the miracle of consciousness itself. this awareness is not instantaneous, on the contrary, it tends to be drawn out, suffered, and continually reformulated. the painting is the object in which swarms of sense stimuli and mental processes coalesce, from a shaft of roman light piercing the workspace, to voices and music from the radio, the felt rhythm of the hand wielding paintbrush, steam curling upward from a cup of tea, intimate thoughts, remembered art, stories, poetry, the guiding instincts of esthetics and ethics. this slow all-at-onceness is made up of bits and hints, of suggestion and indirection, and perfectly suits the author’s deep sense of discretion and reticence. from the travails of their birth emerge images that glow with warmth and serenity. like all art that succeeds in holding and rewarding our gaze, edith urban’s paintings embody, rather than explain, her meditations.   

pia candinas, curator