Eliana Petrizzi

Eliana Petrizzi is one of the great proponents of modern metaphysics: after Giorgio De Chirico's historical metaphysics, the absolute one between 1910 and 1920, and a second new metaphysics in the Seventies, there are a few painters that follow in the footsteps of De Chirico himself, that is, going beyond the real to achieve a new dimension that – be careful – is not dreamlike as, for example, the one proposed by the surrealists, but rather an aware wait, a philosophical awe for the surrounding environment. Not coincidentally, Eliana Petrizzi prefers the depiction of the landscape as caught in its symbolic value, like it is seen for the first time, in the midday light or a primigenial dawn, a kind of silent background before the stage populates for the usual deceit of life. The mechanism behind this miracle is the light: like a “photographic filter” - quoting Andrea B. Del Guercio critique – it is the light that creates the colour variations, typical of Petrizzi's style, green shades fading into black, the purple, the pink and the orange shades: like Hopper, the few souls on the scene sink into a lyrical loneliness. And, again, it is the indirect light to illuminate the portraits from the dark, another field of research of the Italian painter: faces that are drawn sharply by the shadows in their extreme simplicity, and that reveal themselves to the viewer without pretence nor superfluous elements.