Painting as a romantic novel by Nicolas Martino
21st-century existential realism… that's how I thought we could define the work of Narcisa Monni, an artist born and raised in Sardinia (Alghero, 1981) who, after living in London and Rome, decided to move back to her native island, where she teaches painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sassari. And it was there, in Northern Sardinia, at Capo di Sopra, that Narcisa matured as an artist, in a particularly lively climate, which back in the 1990s – believe it or not – had something from the 'acid' and post-punk scene of the Scottish working class, as recounted by Irvine Welsh and Alan Warner, among others.
And this atmosphere is echoed in the works of Narcisa Monni: small tempera and acrylic paintings on sheets of magazines and newspapers, retouched Polaroids, and large-format acrylic paintings on photographic paper. The poetry of the small and intimate objects of everyday life is reflected in her paintings. Although they belong to three different series, the works can be seen as a homogeneous body of work. They instantly transport us in the midst of a sentimental, autobiographical novel, in which we can recognize glimpses of life, such as the trauma of a transition that keeps us suspended between the “not anymore” and the “not yet”.
Recognizing oneself, just as the artist does, in a sort of self-narrative that takes the form of a both individual and collective analysis. Love and friendship, sex and loneliness, habits, and boredom: these are the themes and feelings that the artist tried to capture during the months of the pandemic, when, confined to our homes, we suddenly found ourselves orphans of a life that seemed irretrievably lost.
It is there that the poor material of the magazines and newspapers becomes the support on which the memory rests – the memory of an experience made up of bodies and passions that, in their concreteness, resist digital evaporation, like Polaroids, instant photographs linked to the intimate and homely dimension of the 1970s and 1980s, the age of childhood for those now in their forties and fifties. The revival of the Polaroid comes as no surprise. In a world where digitalization reached its limit, the urgency to possess the vintage materiality is a fact. But we would not be able to fully understand the meaning of this exhibition – and of its title, "Rosa Carne", the artist's alter ego that accompanies us in the labyrinths of this domestic journey – if we did not consider that the third series of works (the most recent one, consisting of large-format pieces) represents a "quantum leap" in the plot of this visual novel.
The acrylics on photographic paper (70x100 and 100x70) are 'different' from the other works not because they are larger, but because they were made by the artificial intelligence, about which so much has been said in recent months. In fact, these paintings were 'created' by an intelligence that was duly informed by the artist. To animate these artificial ghosts, the artist intervened with paint. If we look at the three series on display in their complexity, we can start to understand, little by little, the "conceptual" sense of a narrative that originates in that temporal "neurosis" that is becoming a cardinal symptom of our age.
Caught up in the fear of an ever more threatening future (technology that disrupts the natural order of our lives), and prisoners of a nostalgia for the past that we both regret and wish to prevent from returning in its worst forms (the ‘plague’ is never defeated forever), we are incapable of living in a present that constantly eludes our grasp, and we end up being swallowed up in the vortex of a multiple and paranoid temporality. We live in no time at all, as we experience simultaneous existence within different temporalities, trapped in an incessant and increasingly rapid transformation of the world and our lives. Being in the analogue and digital worlds at the same time is a characteristic of the generation born at the end of the last century.
It may seem surprising that Narcisa Monni uses a 'traditional' medium such as painting to express her inner world. And yet, it is precisely the painting – which the artist 'uses' unscrupulously – that proves to be a medium capable of healing, with its warmth, the trauma of an impossible life, always on the verge of paralysis and freezing. It is a liquid and fast painting, young and attractive, which is at the same time a symptom of a generation caught in the middle, between two worlds and an existential anchorage in a process of general digital abstraction. If this is perhaps one of the reasons why painting seems to be experiencing a revival today, for Narcisa Monni – who is so attentive to the title of each of her works – painting is a true way of life and therefore a way of being in the world.
Nicolas Martino is the founder and editor of «OperaViva Magazine», in addition to numerous essays in catalogs and collective volumes, he has published: with Ilaria Bussoni, È solo l'interno. Rejection, affections, creativity in the long '68 (short shadows, 2018), with Francesco Raparelli, Intelligence in battle. Knowledge and production in late capitalism (short shadows, 2021), and edited the publication of texts by Franco Berardi Bifo and Toni Negri on contemporary art and criticism. He collaborates on the curatorial program of Quadriennale di Roma (2022-2024), and is in the editorial staff of the quarterly «Quaderni d'arte italiana» (Treccani). He teaches Aesthetics in the Fine Arts Academies of Sassari and Genoa, and in NABA (Rome).
