Arte Laguna World presents Piera Franca Carlin, towards new horizons of abstractism.

To begin with, can you introduce yourself to the Arte Laguna World audience by briefly describing your artistic journey?
I started my journey as a child; I was born and raised with colours and brushes in my hand because everyone in my house loved art so it was really part of our entourage to always have something artistic to do. That’s how I am, I wouldn’t know how else to describe myself. Later I attended an art school (liceo artistico) where I did my first exhibitions. The teachers chose those who, in their opinion, could do things of a certain interest, so we started to do small exhibitions in small galleries, especially in the Ligurian Riviera. Then I also attended the Accademia Ligustica di Belle Arti in Genoa and I continued to paint all the time. Logically, I used to do figurative before because in my opinion you cannot get to do abstract if you have not bypassed the figurative first.

When you have mastered figurative art, you can move on. In my long journey, I have done so. In fact, I have also done paintings for friends and relatives that are always figurative, even taking inspiration from 17th century paintings, researching the expressions on faces that are very interesting. In fact, when I go out and about, I still have the bad habit of looking at people’s faces, not because there is anything strange but because I like looking at people, seeing what kind of face they have, what they look like, all for my artistic research. For many years I switched to the abstract because, at a certain point, the figurative no longer said anything to me. It was also tiring to bypass this situation, but in the end I succeeded, I was very satisfied and, although the historical research was quite exciting, the research towards the abstract was more interesting.

I enjoyed seeing where one could get to by means of always bright colours – because I like colours – for example by taking geometric figures, making them ideally rotate in these fictitious spaces of the canvases. For me, however, they were not fictitious but had a volume behind them so I would rotate these planes and, every so often, stop the movement with a colour. And I went on like this but beyond that I wouldn’t know what to do because all research has an end at some point. Now I’m studying to see where to go next.

What does the abstract convey to you more than the figurative?
An emotion. A new emotion because you move towards space. It’s as if I had anticipated a space research – as they are doing now on the various planets to explore them. But instead of exploring the planets, I explored these ideal spaces, which are always very beautiful and interesting spaces so I got a bit lost in them I guess.

In several of your works, an influence of Suprematism and Russian Constructivism is evident. How did you approach these currents and what do you want to communicate by making these styles your own?
My own emotions. I liked Suprematism because it was too different from what I was doing and I was excited to meet it, that’s why I continued on this path. On the other hand, figurative art, yes, it was interesting, it was all studies on expressions, on the arrangement of the characters in the various situations on the canvas, but it didn’t give me any movement. In the end, I realised that Suprematism, although it may seem motionless, does have movement. And this movement I tried to reproduce myself, so my canvases, if one looks at them, seem still, in reality one should be able to penetrate beyond the still image with one’s imagination and sensitivity and see these figures moving in the fictitious space of the canvas.

Let us now take a step back to your beginnings. You deepened your artistic research under the guidance of the art critic Germano Beringheli. What did this relevant figure in the art world of the second half of the 20th century pass on to you? How important was his presence for you?
He smoothed out certain perhaps somewhat exaggerated angles of my character because I am an exuberant, a kind of earthquake. He saw that I was interested in these supremacist currents, so he advised me to research this and I listened to him a lot. However, at a certain point, he told me: ‘If you want to be successful, you should adapt to the times’. There was Transavantgarde but I didn’t feel it was congenial to me and I said ‘No, I’ll keep doing this and if I’m not successful it doesn’t matter’. For me, I have my own success. I was able to arrive at an end, if others don’t understand, so be it! – Even Van Gogh was not understood in his time, they all took him for a fool.

The last question can only be about your future plans. What awaits you now and what do you hope for the future?
I hope that I can continue my research and that, above all, it will lead me towards an abstract expressionism, even more abstract than this one – I don’t know what it will be like because, in fact, when you take certain things to extremes, it doesn’t always work well. I have to try. I am going to try, I am going to do some great alchemy in order to arrive at something new.