Clotilde Ancarani

Clotilde Ancarani sublimely orchestrates the contradictions that give substance to true things. Caught up in the frenzy of her life as woman, artist and mother, eager both to give and to receive, she reminds me of something Virginia Wolf wrote in an odd story called “A room of one’s own”. In it, she recognized the need that, at times, urges women to lie and cheat with space and time so as to protect the slow pace of generating a work of art, by secluding themselves from others, husbands and children for one. Clotilde says: “I play a game of impressions and camouflage. I am in it, behind it, in every fold of it. I put this fragile barrier between all intruders and myself. I take part in the masquerade. Yet I see no faking…” And then one takes a look, and surrenders to the fascination of her universe, fragile and powerful at the same time: impatient gestures matched by chiselled perfection, unrestrained matter pierced by sparks of light, huge paintings and tiny sculptures alongside large sculptures, bursting and overwhelming tenderness.

In this swirl of fans, feathers, armours and caresses, one is swept away by a genuineness whose elegance can barely dissimulate its searing intensity. Splashes and abrupt ruptures confirm this. One thinks of a barricade, a dissolution, a struggle against blindness, a subtle experimenting of symbols.

No doubt Clotilde Ancarani has not yet completed the process of recognizing her own talent. And so she works, explores, grinds, scrapes, glues, weaves and gathers the heterogeneous fragments of her universe, of her own room. In it, doors and windows are open, wide, full of light. One enters and looks on and on and on.

Diane Hennebert

Managing Director Boghossian Foundation,