MATER MATUTA Fruitful art – Ancona Culture

“After crossing the threshold of the Gallery, a forest welcomes us.
It is a forest of totems, which immediately catches the eye: visiting Paola’s studio, the first work my eyes fell on was precisely this forest of columnar figures, slender and solid at the same time. Let us therefore carefully observe this forest of totems, since it immediately introduces us to the themes of Paola Angeloni’s art: the totem, which is an idol, is also an image of the archetype, a central concept in her production.
There are three totemic figures: the knight, the monk and the pregnant mother. They are anthropological archetypes, figures as ancient as humanity, present since the most archaic cultures, and they are archetypes of Paola’s own production, who populated her bronze forest with these figures. The most archetypal of these is certainly her mother. The totemic mother is immediately distinguishable from the knight, armed, and the monk, hooded: the evident belly, in deliberate contrast with the slender length of the figure, and the sagging breasts immediately declare her generative nature.
The archetype is the superior principle that acts at the basis of the creative impulse, that from which art originates: therefore motherhood is the archetype par excellence, the conceptual short circuit of creation.
Mater Matuta, divinity of Roman mythology, is the goddess of dawn, therefore of birth and rebirth, of the new that arises, doubly archetype of motherhood and birth, generator and generated that coincide in a single figure. The Mater is the protagonist of this exhibition: a celebration of both physical motherhood, as such, and symbolic, as a capacity for transformation and generation.
Motherhood is creation itself, it is the origin of all of Paola’s art, which in her own words is a fruitful art.
A creative impulse that is exalted in plastic: sculpture is for Paola the ideal medium to exalt the material and above all to highlight the forms of this generative motherhood.
An art made of female figures who are always mothers, expecting or with a child; figures that enhance the archetypal attributes (precisely) of motherhood: the hips, the belly, the breasts. Breast which, isolated, is also the subject of a work that I find very fascinating, where the symbolism of motherhood leaves room for the exaltation of the female form – or rather of the form tout court.
The sculptures on display are therefore soft, shapely, powerfully tactile in every detail: observe for example Focus, this prosperous mother, with prominent buttocks and fertile breasts, who sits like a modern Madonna of humility, connecting to the humus, the earth who is the mother par excellence; this sculpture also explicitly recalls prehistoric idols such as the famous Venus of Willendorf, archetype of fertility.
The back of this sculpture, with the drapery that wraps the forms and the braid that falls, punctuating the volume, is in my opinion the aesthetic focus of this work, where the forms of motherhood and the matter of the form are splendidly exalted through this exuberant tactility. In this sense, I like to quote a reflection by Paola, according to which sculpture is the form, painting is the image of the form. This takes us back to the forest of totems, where the dialogue between sculpture and painting is a dialogue between form and image: painting becomes a projection of sculpture, the two-dimensional rendering of something that exists in the world, and is concrete.
The Mater of Paola’s imagination is finally – and above all – Mater materia: in her own words “the same bond exists between mater and matter that exists between principle and manifestation”, that is, the mater gives body to the matter of which it itself it is done, in a creative and generative short circuit. Matter is what we are made of, what art is made of, therefore something on which the artist exercises his creativity, transforming it.
Mater is the origin, Matter is the thing originated: that thing that in Paola became sculpture.”
Marco Tarsetti