Maria Cristina Della Berta

Galica Arte Contemporanea, Milan
Through February 28

The characters in Della Berta’s paintings are young girls with gangly bodies and faces often blemished by imperfection: the lips a bit too big, widely spaced eyes, an impertinently turned-up nose drawn in caricature-like fashion.

At first glance they seem to be cartoonish incarnations of youthful loneliness staged in easily recognizable places: a public square awash with neon, an empty kitchen, or an anonymous street in an urban suburb.

However, certain details—like the chromatic correspondence between the girl’s dress and the tram passing behind her in Città mattino presto or the subject’s impossible, flower-strewn hairstyle in Avvisaglie di primavera—indicate a perceptive alienation. The observer thus understands that the works do not document adolescent reality tout court, but are instead precisely studied “sets” that present a dimension of “otherness,” a “parallel universe.”

Although the girls’ gazes are impenetrably reflective, which emphasizes the separation between their reality and that of the observer, they provoke empathy. Their vicissitudes embody, even in their warped manifestation, moments that we all have experienced: a Sunday afternoon spent on the couch, as in Domenica pomeriggio or the desolation of being stuck on the side of the road with a broken-down car, perfectly rendered in In panne. In Temporali, the protagonist experiences the thunderstorms of the title both metaphorically, as the tempestuous changes in her love story, and literally, as the leaden skies portrayed—emotions that we all undergo.




Paola Colombo
Translation by Amanda Coulson