Five Elements

“Angela Mrositzki’s most recent paintings are inspired by one of the oldest themes in Art, those four elements which, according to humanist theory, are at the heart of the visible world and which continually shape men’s personalities.

The artist, immersed on one of Italy’s ancient and natural microregions, where there is still a strong and lasting imprint of such a culture, creates a dynamic image of four primary elements – water, air, earth and fire – with the use of colour, which dominates without question her large pictures but at the same time remains true to her strong sensibility.

Angela Mrositzki’s work begins with a slow layering of colour onto paper:  this is a time of reflection and discipline that is done in solitude, a necessary confrontation between the immense field of painting and the boundary of her own interior world, between the wide horizon of chromatic colours and the shadowy vallies of her own character.  Then, using a laborious method, the large sheets of paper are stuck onto canvas, pulled as tight as a drum onto a cold metal stretcher and then transferred when paper and canvas have permeated each other, onto an ordinary wooden frame.  The assembly of works is done with the help of expert craftsmen with whom the artist exchanges methods and knowledge, showing how keen she is to develop her abilities and convictions, something which consciously emerged during her studies with the Accademia di Urbino, between the slow and careful technical side and contemporary restlessness.

At the end of this long process, there is a new pictorial result, which is canvas, paper and colour.  The large pictures thus reveal a surprising identity, which is somewhere between support and image.

The pictures with their barely perceptible consistency of paint on paper at the same time blend into the tactile quality of the weft of the canvas and become one.  The process through which the artist concludes her work offers a key to the interpretation of the theme of the 5 elements.

The fifth element is in fact for Angela Mrositzki the necessary and never ending metamorphosis to which the materials are subjected.  Without this transformation, the four original elements would only be an empty space like the deep velvety black, from which the colour catches fire.

The metamorphosis is therefore the very essence and the real protagonist, it is the route down which the artist directs her work to give it form and consistency, to give weight and individuality.  The theme of her paintings, coincides therefore with its very method and the fifth element emerges from a changeable reality, which has a constant need to be renewed and therefore reinterpreted.”

Laura Safred. Urbino, June 2004.