Is titled “Amazing” and it’s there shows that Barbara Bertucci inaugurated last night in the premises of Gargantuà Tavern in Pistoia, in Piazza dell’Ortaggio. These are six canvases that the Pistoia artist – who in December two years ago had inaugurated «Fantasmagorie» at the Libreria Lo Spazio – decided to dedicate to six female figures. Which have a common theme: the “use of narcotic substances”.
Clearly provocative – but those who know Bertucci know that her art thrives on provocations that are always halfway between the desire to shock and that of making people reflect (years ago she made a beautiful show on the asbestos deaths among workers in Breda) – the exhibition was born after the artist read a book on the Marchesa Casati Stampa: «Among those pages there was a scene: the Marchesa, in scantily clad clothes, inoculates herself with belladonna extract to make her life more languid and bright look,” she says. At that point she starts drawing and then painting. Not by chance the subjects concern cocaine, absinthe, opium and – among others – hashish. The canvases – small in size – are refined: in their chromaticism they tell of women who are also literary heroines. In these works we can find echoes of Baudelaire but also of Rimbaud.
