dialogues | podcast | no. 06
Interview with Greta Chicheri (on display)
Dialogues no. 6 Greta Chicheri
Transcription
- Interview with Greta take one.
- Well, I studied Fine Arts, but always before. Always
I liked painting in class, I drew in books and then in the family. My mother has always been very present with art. My great-grandmother copied Italian Renaissance paintings and I saw them. He made everything embossed, made of silver. So art has always been present and I have always liked to draw.
So it's not strange that in the end I knew very early that I wanted to study Fine Arts and. And I have always had it very clear. Well, painting within the arts, for me, color and something that is sensitive, almost that you can touch, is very important. I mean, it's not as much as the sculpture would be, but I'm very interested in color and even though it's two-dimensional, it has that sensation of something more, more plastic, more tactile.
Well, I don't, no, when I start painting I never think about that. It is no longer a necessity and a bit of a matter of what comes out later, because you analyze what you are doing a little more, then you see what someone has written about you and you understand a little more about why you do what you do, because sometimes it You do it instinctively and I was very struck by the landscape when I arrived in Fuerteventura.
And of course, maybe someone who has always lived here, well it doesn't shock him as much as it does me, who came from a very green place and always here upon arriving and then having the horizon of the sea so present, wherever you are on the island . For me that was like a push to start painting. In Fuerteventura the very pure landscape is very present.
It is not an island where the elements, the sea, the wind, the mountains have a lot of force. And in reality my works simply try to transmit that landscape from the filter of my memory or my sensations. It is true that you can take it from another point of view, more ecological, more of preservation, but for me it is a communion and a way of expressing what I see through my thoughts.
The shapes are very simplified shapes, very some paintings have seen almost an abstraction, because well, sometimes you recognize it by a palm tree or some other detail, more realistic, more anecdotal, but they are so simplified that they are close to the abstraction, not to something more geometric than if it does not become by. Because you can recognize a house that, although it is quite simplified, you can also recognize.
It could be an almost abstract painting, because it is a bit what I told you before, that the desert shocked me a lot and that is that the desert has the ability to project shadows and to see. The truth is that it is a landscape that makes you fall in love with it a little more slowly, because it is not the green, the sensual, the exuberant.
This usually catches your attention sooner. And this desert landscape is like slower and the shadows from dawn to dusk you can't see perfectly how they are drawn along the bad country and that, that catches my attention a lot and since there are few elements, well they are Those elements are very protagonists and project those shadows that are so important to me.
That's why there is always such a strong contrast of lights and shadows in my paintings, which is something very, very characteristic of the desert. I always think that a fundamental quality of artists is not so much learning to paint, but rather learning to look. And for those of us who like art and nature more, we take advantage of that capacity at any time.
While I am not sleeping, I am looking at the landscape, I am not trying to look for things and suddenly I say hey, look, look at that branch how it twists, look at small details but in the end they create like a painting and you are seeing it and you have the opportunity all day to see those little paintings that appear. So well, I'm on the beach a lot, I'm driving around a lot and I can take advantage of everything, all of that for
collect interesting information.
And the other day I was listening to well, I don't remember who said it, but it was an actor and he said that at no time. Many times we don't feel like looking at art, reading poetry, but sometimes there is. There are things in life that make art super necessary, like. Like sometimes they say that art saves us, right?
And it is true that when important things happen in life, people who transmit through music or painting or sculpture feel that need and I don't think they do it with the purpose of communicating something, but rather as to let go of what is inside. Then, whether it communicates or not, it will be a great virtue and then more people will understand it.
But the birth of art, I believe, is more like the artist's need to express something, something more therapeutic than an intention to transmit a message.