Galerie Wolfrum
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Review Wiener Zeitung 2023
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“In front of her paintings I always have to think of this anecdote about the ancient Greek painter Apelles. One of his students had painted the beautiful Helena, the most attractive, irresistible and most seduced woman of her time, overloaded with jewelry, whereupon the master remarked: “Aha, you couldn’t paint her beautifully, so you made her rich.
Hmm. But in the Lucia Riccelli, the sitters don’t even wear earrings. Or a tiny little nose piercing. Yes, exactly. The Italian painter and performer, who moved to Vienna, was finally able to render them in an aesthetically pleasing way, so she could safely let them stay poor. Even for clothes they apparently have no money. Okay, that’s not the reason why they are undressed. They are simply nudes.
The canvas puts on painting
Riccelli (“Even when you don’t paint, you actually keep working”) could also afford more color. It is not out of financial need that she has this brilliantly sketchy style, capable of characterizing a pose with just a few strokes and blots. At least she clearly does not suffer from a horror vacui, this fear of emptiness, which is supposed to be the reason why some people stuff their pictures so full. On the contrary.
She lively throws the female body onto the raw canvas, which of course is not a fitted sheet. (Or somehow it is. It is stretched, isn’t it?) So that the nudity of the figures and that of the canvas merge into pure sensuality. Funnily enough, the one, the figures, expose themselves as soon as the other, the canvas, covers itself. Namely covered with paint. Poorly. However, in the most seductive tones. And besides: these nudes, which are not located anywhere (at most on the canvas), are not soooo obviously naked anyway. Around them no environment is suggested, no space.
Party at the acrylic and oil party.
The fantasy lips may be closed, silent, but the artist’s hand speaks to us in sign language. Quasi. Becomes gestural. Makes spontaneous decisions. “It’s like a voice telling me. I’m a medium there,” notes a Riccelli herself, sometimes surprised by the result. And what is this mysterious rag that one of them is holding? A piece of her own skin. As a visualization of the desire “to give away layers of ourselves in order to show something else”. (But it could just as well be a cloth, a skin-colored, ergo colorful one.) And the brush keeps dripping coquettishly, losing part of its liquid charge as it transports the paint to the place on the picture where it is needed. (The watercolors are more “chamber”, more delicate. But no less expressive than the wild acrylic-and-oil parties on canvas).
This open painting itself, one with high recognition value, is already erotic, sexy. And not just because she has no “underwear” on, no primer underneath”.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
