To paint the metropolis not as a landscape, but as a shockwave.

 

For Titina Maselli, the city cannot be contemplated or described. Her brushes capture it on the fly, at the very moment it threatens to slip from view. In her works, urbanity appears as a bundle of tensions, of conflicting speeds. Architectural lines and hurtling bodies clash with a raw, frenzied, unbreakable energy. 

 

There is in her a visceral loyalty to what Charles Baudelaire, as a theorist of modernity, called ‘the transitory, the fleeting, the contingent’. A fascination with the event – das Ereignis – with that which surges forth, resists, bursts forth.

 

For the city itself – right down to its outbursts, its friction, its screeches, its tiniest surges of intensity. Perhaps we should speak of attraction. Of magnetism.

 

It loves clashes. Improbable pairings. Chance encounters on the web: a sewing machine, a boxing glove, a building, an umbrella. By turns stormy, by turns twilight-like, the city becomes a hallucinatory theatre where the sensory collides, the heterogeneous converges. A skilful aesthetics of collision.

  • ‘She always entered the city at night, or with just enough night to open up the city—tunnels, underground railways, shadows...
    Titina Maselli, Panta Rhei, 1971, Acrylic on canvas

    ‘She always entered the city at night, or with just enough night to open up the city—tunnels, underground railways, shadows falling from high up into the gaping chasms between skyscrapers, the interiors of bars, shutters drawn, the thick walls piled high, bars or grilles arranged and riveted, and bodies hurled into them at full speed and with all their might. She has always entered the city, always already entered and always in the process of entering it, not as one who comes from outside, but as one who comes from within the city itself, from its streets and its buildings, and who wishes to penetrate even further inwards, into the nocturnal and night-radiating core of urbanity—compacted, piled up, heaped, pressed”
    - Jean-Luc Nancy, “Expression de Titina Maselli”, text written for the exhibition organised in 1997 by the Italian Cultural Institute in Strasbourg.

  • (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).