Tempo Landscape I

A MANIFEST TO THE ENVIRONMENT : TEMPO LANDSCAPE PAINTINGS. I dive into this giant organism, the city. I collect and catalog witness materials [urban residues] to create urban poems that represents an environmental more and more mineral which takes precedence over a virgin nature. Awareness of the importance of exercising citizenship towards the quotidien environment.

“The meticulous act of creating billions of points to compose the work is an internal submersion, as if through these gestures, I was again plunging into amniotic uid to reinvent myself,” writes the artist about the paintings Inner Landscape and Tempo Landscape, begun in 2017. Daniela Busarello creates these large and medium-sized linen and cotton canvases by endlessly repeating marks le by a spatula dipped in oil or pigment of her own making. The surface is covered with regular symbols, similar without being exactly identical; we can see di erent lines, shi s, dots, reliefs and at areas. Rather we should speak of cadence, of a musical score, one not based on any pre- established system. The canvas follows the gesture’s progression, of the uninterrupted search for an inde nite and unstable form, while the artist plunges even deeper into her female body. Her breathing gives rhythm to the composition, infusing the canvases in an alternance of inhalations and exhalations, of fullness and emptiness, of silences and notes. For the artist it is a question of painting abstract scenes: whether they are allusions to dance movements, a game of attraction and repulsion, of amorous relations, sexual organs or bodily uids, the starting point is always the human body. Because, to quote Giuseppe Penone, an artist I consider very close to Daniela Busarello in terms of his sensitivity and view of the natural world, “the language of art is still and will always be founded on the senses... The uncertainty of these senses, of perceptions, has always nourished imagination and artistic production. There is a set of values, of knowledge, feelings and perceptions linked to material that a mathematical reading of reality will never give us: that is, sensuality.” Daniela Busarello’s canvases are sensual, tangible, they cling to life, representing shapes that transform into gures, but sometimes seem to transform into fur, the luxurious plumage of exotic or fantastic animals. This also contributes to the fascination her works exert, born of the metamorphosis happening before the viewer, between skin and fur, body and nature. The artist’s relation to mythology is clear, and her attraction to Ovid understandable, since the poet also celebrated nature and its osmosis with humans. For example, the Ovidian myth of Daedalus and Icarus has inspired great artists and given life to powerful, fantastic images: think of Icarus’s extraordinary plumage painted by the Victorian artist Herbert James Draper, held in the Tate Britain. The richness and chromatic palette of the wings evoke the landscape bodies of Daniela Busarello’s paintings. And remember the legend of Philemon and Baucis, transformed into two trees, joined by their trunks, metaphorically recalled in the Brazilian artist’s work by the intertwining of branches and leaves.

The earth, mother goddess, is extolled in the work of Daniela Busarello through the process of gathering and then cataloguing the “material witnesses” she collects from the ground. The earth is revealed as the origin of all life, with all beings born from it, because she is woman and mother. Her virtues of so ness and stability, serenity and durability, to which should be added humility, which is etymologically linked to humus, towards which she tends. While she is inspired by the earth as a material, Daniela’s works show, above all, the perspective of a woman who recomposes the world around a calming, unifying and syncretic feminine. Taking up the Latin concept of Genius Loci, which expresses the singular, unique spirit and character of a place, the artist explores di erent territories (Lanzarote island’s nature reserves, Porto no, deserts, cities, mountains in Iran, the cities of Paris [10], Venice, Aubusson, and Curitiba in Brazil and more) and focuses on the relationship between culture and ecosystem, paying particular attention to the land, to the processes of its transformation and its matter. Heir to the approach of the Land Art artists of the 1960s and ’70s, in view of today’s ecological emergency Daniela Busarello moves beyond these re ections. In her eyes, being an artist means being concerned with our own era and with re-establishing harmony between nature and culture through gestures and techniques that art history o en judges as minor because they are considered feminine.

In her personal endeavours at ecologic restoration, begun as poetic expressive gestures, there are points of convergence with contemporary ecofeminism. Originating in the United States in the early 1980s, alongside burgeoning fears of nuclear threats, the movement has found new impetus in our society threatened by more natural disasters. The goal of ecofeminism, like Daniela Busarello’s artistic practice, is to return value to what has been devalued, that is to say, the freely accepted link between nature and corporality. From put upon nature, we are moving towards an ecology that is liberating for women and their community. [Lucia Pesapane 2020]