It’s lyrical
It’s eternal fire and movement
Repeat rewind repeat
Sisyphus is running
Landscape collage-paintings and music 2007-2018 (selection)
It is Only by Libido Alone That The Cosmos Survives, collage and oil painting canvas, 50 x 150 cm, 2010
It is Only by Libido Alone That The Cosmos Survives - detail
It is Only by Libido Alone That The Cosmos Survives - detail
It is Only by Libido Alone That The Cosmos Survives - detail
It is Only by Libido Alone That The Cosmos Survives - detail
It is Only by Libido Alone That The Cosmos Survives - detail
It is Only by Libido Alone That The Cosmos Survives - detail
It is Only by Libido Alone That The Cosmos Survives - detail
Karussell gen Osten, collage and oil painting, 50 x 77 cm, 2008
Karussell gen Osten and Music Ornamented With Trophies, artist book and music CD, 2009
Karussell gen Osten, detail - The Departure
Karussell gen Osten, detail - Somersaults and Celebrations
Karussell gen Osten, detail - The Exciteds
Karussell gen Osten, detail - The Faun with the Arch and One of the Four Winds
Karussell gen Osten, detail - The Grand Fluttering Magisterium
Karussell gen Osten, detail - Two of the Three Marys
Karussell gen Osten, detail - The Papessa
Karussell gen Osten, detail - It's Good Meat
Karussell gen Osten and Music Ornamented with Trophies
Painting, music, poem, artist book - 2009
This work references the collage painting Karussell gen Osten, created by E. Lotti Astolfi in 2009 - then using the pseudonym of Irina von Brota. The artist composed a music score, a poem and an artist book as a way of entering the concept and the narrative structure of the painting through a non linear and interdisciplinary map.
Central elements of the project are 26 characters that shape the painted landscape, such as It’s Good Meat, The Hooligan Faun, One of the Four Winds, The Departure, which appear and are listed inside the book.
The poem acts as a narrative voice, like a chorus commenting on the scene. The powerful music merges classical and electronic elements and was composed by E. Lotti Astolfi while creating the painting. The soundtrack is divided into three acts and accompanies the non linear visual experience of the book and the painting.
The project has been developed further with the production of 26 individual prints of the painting’s characters and an interactive DVD presentation of the artist book.
Text, images, music, production Elena Lotti Astolfi aka Irina von brota © 2009
Please listen with headphones.
Elon Elena Lotti Astolfi’s work is extremely complex and composed on multiple planes of experience, a research conducted within the highest Italian pictorial tradition and at the same time turned to the most advanced forms of contemporary artistic research.
The starting point is the collage: a programmed work of decomposition and recomposition of the fragments of images that are scattered in the great dump of the imaginary of the 21st century. In the end, cut-up, sampling, are the only forms of language processing that humankind has been working on for the past two to three hundred years. The recombinant form continues to produce precise innovative contemporary expressions capable of intensely telling and perceiving the present. It is a work toward entropy, toward the recoding of chaotic signs, which reconstructs not an ordered cosmos but an alchemical transformation. A desperate vitality of images that does not surrender to the spectacularity of the global world.
The weapon is painting, an amalgam that redesigns over and through the epidermal supports that are layered as in Deleuze in the thousand planes of escape that Lotti Astolfi imposes on her universe. Thus it happens to get lost. There is never a programmatic center in her works, but swirls of meanings that collide and multiply in their juxtaposition. These are battles of the sign that are arranged before our eyes, in which as in real war we have but our own private point of view to distance ourselves. Very large very small continuously overlap. It is possible that our looking is unable to stop. It does not find peace. Writing. Pictures. Images of films. Clusters of visual memory defragmenting the capacity to form meaning. The endless dump of artworks produced, consumed, watched.
All this mixture then instead, from a great distance, is measured by the broad plots of Italian painting. What reassembles is a spectacle that dialogues with Pontormo's reds, with Tintoretto's compositions, with Paolo Uccello's battles.
It is a garden of delights that moves within the visions of Bosch. As if all that world of sounds, beasts, nature, figures, words flowing in Lotti Astolfi's representations is a work on the borderlands of painting. At the transition points between two different here and nows. There is a speed and transparency that we see from Bacon. Yet it is a work that does not lead back to postmodern quotations. This whole universe of montage is inherently painting. The real kind. The kind that moves the heart.
These are visions that set in motion the fear, the deep sense of dread, that great works open up when they look into the darkness of the world. They tell of a happy and un-surrendered wrecking through a lucid storytelling and visionary eye.
Elon Elena Lotti Astolfi: The Battle of the Sign
by Prof. Arch. Valerio Bindi, Sciatto Produzie - Rome, 2007
On the Deathbed: Ostentation, collage and oil painting on canvas, 50 x 100 cm, 2010
On the Deathbed: Ostentation, detail
On the Deathbed: Ostentation, detail
On the Deathbed: Ostentation, detail
On the Deathbed: Ostentation, detail
On the Deathbed: Ostentation, detail
On the Deathbed: Ostentation, detail
On the Deathbed: Ostentation, detail
When The Deers Lose Their Antlers, collage and oil painting on canvas, 50 x 77 cm, 2010
When The Deers Lose Their Antlers, detail
When The Deers Lose Their Antlers, detail
When The Deers Lose Their Antlers, detail