Leonilde Carabba - The Queen of Cups or the Dream of Love

The subject of this work was conceived through a citationist approach. In the phenomenology of artistic movements, citationism consists of reproposing an image from the past, from the historical-artistic tradition, recontextualizing it according to the artist's sensibility. Citationism has been and is transversal to various contemporary artistic movements, such as Surrealism, Metaphysical Art, and Anachronism. LeoNilde Carabba's citationist production is nourished by various stimuli and creative processes that lead to consistently original and surprising results.

This work is part of a very particular series in which LeoNilde Carabba references the Italian pictorial tradition, extracting from it fragments of identity and reassembling them in a different order. This work is exemplary of this phase of the Monza-born artist's career. The composition is built on a strong citational component, drawing images from a virtual gallery that draws on the collective imagination (history and art) or the symbolic-esoteric nature of the painter's own cultural background. However, everything is recontextualized by the juxtaposition of alienating, abstract, or figurative elements that reconstruct the story according to the artist's sensibility, even with a certain dose of Dadaist irony (especially in the title). Formally, the quality is also highly elaborate, with the citational-hyperrealistic component of the collage insert prevailing over the actual pictorial intervention. The result of all these creative stimuli is the creation of a sort of tarot, the meaning of which is unknown to us and the key to its interpretation is revealed, enigmatically and partially, by the artist.

LeoNilde Carabba, born in Monza in 1938 and currently residing in Milan, likes to define herself as "a painter and a traveler who loves to explore territories and cross borders". In 1961 LeoNilde held her first solo exhibitions. The following years saw her increasingly involved in the art world, where she received the support and formative influence of artists such as Lucio Fontana, Hsiao Chin, Roberto Crippa, Enrico Baj, Turcato, Tancredi, Jean Fautrier, Piero Manzoni, Christo and Carla Accardi. In 1966 she began experiments on the refraction of light, achieving, through the use of glass microspheres, a surface with a light intensity that varied according to the viewer's angle of vision without the need for mechanical means. If Lucio Fontana had previously presented her own exhibition (1964), in 1969 she exhibited with him and Bruno Munari in "Il Segno e l'Oggetto" at the Galleria Cadario in Caravate. In 1975, she co-founded the Women's Bookshop in Milan. In 1976, she founded the Beato Angelico Cooperative with Carla Accardi, Nedda Guidi, Eva Menzio, Suzane Santoro, Silvia Truppi, and others. She currently works in both Italy and Germany.

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