Biography of Laura Venturi

Born in Pisa where she works, she began her art studies at the "A. Passaglia  Institute" of Lucca , under the guidance of prestigious artists like Giuseppe Ardinghi, Pierluigi Romani and Mario Palagi. She graduated and specialized in “affresco” and mural painting. She subsequently continued her studies and attended various courses at the Institute of History of Arts, University of Pisa. She started painting very early  by exposing her work in Tuscany and won several prizes and awards. Very young she began teaching  art education.
She has held various personal exhibitions and participated in various collective and national and international awards in Pisa , Livorno, Massa , Lucca , Ferrara , Bologna , Agrigento , Palermo , Cosenza , Modena , Milan , Turin , Naples , New York , Amilly (France). Her works can be found in numerous private collections in Italy and abroad, and public Centers . She  is  included in the Group of the Artists in the “Historical-Critical Documentary” of  Lodovico Gierut . She exhibits with "ArteDonna" ,"IdeArte" and ASART of  Pietrasanta. She is a promoter of Mariparalleli (www.mariparalleli.it) and the artistic coordinator of the “Arts Centre Tongiorgi” of Pisa , where she organizes art exhibitions and cultural events for young people  and adults.
They wrote of her:
Ilario Luperini, Michele Fuoco, Paola Marcone, Lodovico Gierut, Paul Grigò, Ezio Cappa, Patrizia Ferretti, Anna Francesca Biondolillo, Sandra Lucarelli, Fernando Palagano, and others.
Her works are on permanent display at the Gallery 'GordioArt' in Pisa and Congress Palace in Pisa.
Penetrating vigour of colour in Laura Venturi’s work
Ilario Luperini
The recent works by Laura Venturi arise from a progressive course of study and research that began long ago (the late sixties of the twentieth century) and resumed with vigour after a long period of stagnation due to family circumstances, which, as it often happens, have removed her from her truest passion.
The painter begins, in fact, in 1968, fresh from the Art Institute of Lucca, with works carried on with dedication and profit.
Initially, the paintings are almost moulded in low relief Efflorescenza, 1968)  with the projecting element often camped on a compact and uniform background (Sterpi Arno, 1975).
Subsequently, the relief loses materiality and melts, turns into sculptural pieces of harmonious shapes (in the years 1997 to 2007.) Thick draperies, thick fantastic landscapes, sculpted curves generate intense, plastic articulation, wavy tangles, large scrolls; harmony of enveloping masses characterizes the period; figure and environment are equally affected by this trend of curved plastic, with soft lighting and soft colours, finely modulated giving lightness to the compositions. Craftsmanship and technical skill are undoubted. The impression is, however, that the painter has not yet reached her equilibrium point. The sensation is that of an apparent serenity, an apparent harmonic solution by which reality is wrapped, a harmony that unifies foreground and background through a fine passage of  tones and surfaces. There is, however, a latent power, controlled only with difficulty.
Then comes a time (2008 onwards) in which all the inner tension explodes. And the language is radically transformed: the colour range glows of strong lights, the backgrounds are full of internal joints, the colours give up their purity and give rise to jagged mixtures, the areas are full of signs at the edge of the gesture. Stamped letters appear, concrete fragments of objects are entered in the space of the picture; the artistic culture of the painter emerges: from Cubism to pop, from Futurism to humble art, from Kandinsky to the “graffiti”, to Basquiat. And it is a good thing: it is clear that her creativity has solid foundations, not improvisation, superficiality, amateurism. Harmony gives way to turmoil dramatically.
The basic structure of his work is mazelike. This is attested, among other things, by the title of one of her works: “Mazes and graffiti”, 2010
The maze  is not just a game for reference and mirror, dream, nightmare, enigma theatre, opacity, multiplication, loss, closing, solitude, blindness, but also liberation.
The labyrinth is the consciousness in the indecipherability of her thickness, which the artist attempts to explore in its entirety.
The hand run by the jerks unexpressed of emotion and unconscious, retrieved from the thrill of the depths where reason exiles them, creates a painting which does not aim at the fantastic  transfiguration of reality, but plays with her energy; it is satisfied with her own movement to invent a world without measure. The painting is the space and space is the thing to represent. The communication does not exist only in the word, but to give vent to the soul that pulses, beats and records voiceless.
In Laura’ s present search, thought no longer runs into things, but it is an instrument of introspection. Her painting is a movement which gathers speed, so that there is no end.
The artist invites us here to have a trip into her inwardness and introspection, induction, in the deepest part of ourselves, to explore the hidden areas of our own difference. Laura Venturi  becomes a conscious reporter of her own existence, her own past and present.
Present is intended as a temporary part of a continuum; memory becomes current and  current becomes memory thanks to the  energy that emanates from the strong colour contrasts of the last works, composed of meshes of bright colours crossed by a dynamic system of signs and put into vibration by the inclusion of real fragments of reality. A complex dynamics sought in the propagation and intersections of coloured shapes  and in inner stores that their  tension reveals.
Forms, rather than camping in  space,  fit into unstable postures, as they were in the impossible position to emerge from space and at the same time to descend into it. The setting-up of the painting  removes certainty to signs which, often materializing  in openings (doors, windows, entrances), indicate a location, external or internal. This creates a particular focal image centred on the forms equally steeped in matter and light.
Very dynamic, they communicate motion to the space, motion which  is like the dynamic continuation of  internal movements. Mental and psychological, this motion induces a vertigo that accompanies to unknown depths, endless, just imagined. Her paintings are set up and composed in areas of conflict that arise from the relationship between reality and  psyche. They are, in their own scans and scores, detectors of light and colour events, of materials, of outcrops and collapses, of zooming in and out, of mixed up and subverted perspectives and points of escape.
The problem of the colour, of its chiaroscuro modulations, its purity or its mixtures, the different results in relation to the different nature of the media and their more or less complex preparation, finds temporary and interim solutions in a very intense emotional dimension.
Works such as “The Courage of ideas”, “Yes I remember”, “Opaque Signs”, give us a sense of a great inner work supported by technical skill and inexhaustible thirst for research. The painter  listens carefully to herself and tries to unravel the turmoil that drives her consciousness at different levels of depth. Here come the contrasts of colour, broken lines, graffiti, spaces that mix - whirling - memory, emotions, thoughts, suggestions, affections.
Not that the current creative phase of Laura Venturi is the last port of her research, but there is no doubt that it represents a particularly successful moment in defining a new and independent language, as though the artist was released from all academic conditioning, from every prissy refinement and has been put in front of herself to prove to what extent she  is capable of forcing her ego, to grasp the secrets, the mysteries, the unpredictable paths.
We are witnessing the implosion of an inner world of which the artist boldly takes cognizance and that strives to reconcile, knowing that her findings do not mean searching for lost harmony, but persistence of  the contraries,  existence of conflicts, renewal of tensions.
Self-portrait with red dress is its emblem: it is a self-addressed portrait, where a piece of red surface wanders in space upset by chromatic whirls sucked by (or coming from?) crevices that point endlessly. The swirl of conflicting forces is highlighted by the breakdown of the pictorial field through points of view that are constantly changing direction interlocking one other, so as not to give any point of reference. Small, in red lettering, relegated to a secluded portion of the painting an ego points clearly at the artist herself. 
An inexhaustible source of visions, fantasies,  slices of everyday life, memories, projects, feelings, emotions. Not all of the same quality, but all marked by a stream of rhythms that take shape in the vague and undefined territory of the doubt, question, research, dialectic of opposites.
And therein lies the strength and originality of Laura Venturi.
June 2010

The "paintings" of the inner life of Laura Venturi
" La Gazzetta di Modena" section on page 29 -21 May 2009: AGENDA AND LETTERS
It is based on a texture of widely different images the painting that Laura Venturi presents, until Sunday, at  "Art Studio The sky in a room", in Selmi 91. A simultaneity of "tracks", even  of real reference, which find fine arrangements, generating a game of clever references to man's inner life as well.
The picture shows a pattern of explosive notations in detail  the artist of Pisa puts on the canvas with  great creativity .
Those combinations, almost of transgression, which do not cancel  irrational, fantastic signs, wish to trace routes to  man’s inner “labyrinths”, at the discovery of the secret aspects that every creature possesses.
No coincidence that the glimpse inside the doors and windows seems to arise as "rents", access to places of psychological analysis of man, of which  the artist offers a mirror  without a real image.
Sites with areas of lighting, examined in the dynamics of light, solid shadows, collage, opaque fabric inserts on the painting. A work created with mixed techniques and also poor materials, with a constructive process that invokes the formation of the artist graduated in mural painting and fresco.
You cannot  bring Laura Venturi’s work back only to a root. In a direction that we can largely say neo-expressionist, Laura Venturi retrieves suggestions  very diverse among them; she appreciates the psychological and emotional depths of our existential realism, and  gestures reminiscent of  Dova’s work.
But her  original connection with the figurative tradition,  includes her in a  remarkably updated painting in terms of subjects, made timeless by the rigour that dominates it  and transforms it into a sort of challenge in a perennial battle with the image.
The chromatic tone on raw jute  or strong fillers is the field in which the figures are measured between fragment, memory and dream.
The most recent works are "spontaneous architectures" preceeded by large preparatory drawings, as large are the  canvases: the artist tends to listen to the needs, current needs, to get involved, to live a stable situation, then  even  written words emerge accompanying the material   on large surfaces worked  with mixed media, aware that since ancient times the sign of the writing has closely interacted with words,
from Egyptian hieroglyphs to phonetic experiments of Futurism up to the contemporary visual writing, where the  words support  images or become images themselves.
The "Graffi  and graffiti," so named by the artist with reference to the most recent production, require fantastic interpretation, as going  out from towns visited  which  walk away slowly from the visual field, ceasing to contemplate the sweetness and the quiet of those forms stabilized, to bring them out from the surfaces of the same paintings and reconnecting them one another with more  machined surfaces.
Laura Venturi's painting finds a personal arrangement within that flow of complex, overwhelming and inexhaustible expression , originated a century ago and articulated,
up to today,in many currents and  theoretical statements, epiphany of complex upheavals that have concerned, in the early 20th century, all the cultural world , music, literature, plastic arts as a whole, with the final break towards the genres, categories and layers of historical and academic art.
The works proposed today by Laura Venturi have deep roots and document   the current goal, in a context of substantial continuity with regard to  the expressive choices made, which emphasizes the strength of consistency of a humble methodical search which, at this late stage, leads  the artist to give up the elements of concrete figurativeness  immediately readable.
The involving sinuosity, the tonal delicacy, the contrasts blunted by lyricism of colour give gradually place to broken nervous lines, where space is organized, divided, expanded  or compressed with dynamic expressiveness and pregnant harsh chiaroscuro. Immediately readable, recurring  in many works, the presence of openings (doors, windows, accesses) that suggest a reading path that directs the imagination towards further dimensions.
The research stages, extended to  research supports (often made of poor materials), different materials and fabrics and  selection of pigments on the canvases, have fostered very free brushwork and a graphic which, in its angularity, defines and suggests the colour and returns the intrinsic spatial dynamics. We are facing a gestural approach, given to an immediate emotion, which tends to shape the design intention, without any  rationalizing intermediary  (in possible relation with the title assigned to the exhibition), previously explained in works of that kind, of allegorical abstraction, metaphysical symbolism, before landing at the current stage of expression.
In these ethereal  atmospheres  you can find an ecstatic enchantment in front of  the mystery of the unconscious, with an overpowering need to escape, to search for a renewed peace ... it is not s painting that can you can  browse just with  the look, just for an instinctive reading that does not leave memory. Quite the opposite: an encounter that arises surprises  and restless events. An intense and sad wondering, a melancholy journey that cries like the clatter of a train at a dark station at  night, which  goes without sparks, dazzles and then goes out and asks again.
RECENT EXHIBITIONS
2006
• “ART EXPO’”- Pisa
• MOSTRA PERSONALE Galleria Alba- FERRARA
• PREMIO INTERNAZ.“Le Muse”.ROYAL VICTORIA HOTEL- Pisa
• GALLERIA “ARTBUSINESS” PALERMO
• “EXPO’DEL MEDITERRANEO”- COSENZA
• “CONOSCI LA TERRA DOVE FIORISCONO I LIMONI?”Torre degli Upezzinghi
2007
• “IL MITO DI NARCISO” con ARTEDONNA” Limonaia Ruschi- 2007 -
• GALLERIA” LA TAVOLOZZA”- PONTEDERA
• ARTEDONNA- Galleria la Tavolozza- PONTEDERA
• Teatro ”IL CANOVACCIO” PISA. Festa della donna
• “NAVIGLIO GRANDE” – Corsico MILANO
• Opera “Il cielo in una stanza” - Migliarino Pisano
• “DINAMISMI ED UTOPIE NELL’ARTE CONTEMPORANEA”- Torre degli Upezzinghi
• “AMORE E PSICHE” con “ARTEDONNA”Limonaia Ruschi-
• “IDEARTEMARE” - TIRRENIA
• ”FESTA DEL MUSEO” S. Gervasio – Pisa
2008
• MOSTRA PERSONALE “Percezioni dei sensi” ALTOPASCIO-LUCCA
• “ART EXPO” PISA
• MOSTRA PERSONALE - Castello di Alica - ( Palaia di PISA)
• RASSEGNA FIDAPA – Bottini dell’olio- LIVORNO
• IV ° INCONTRO DI ARTISTI CONTEMPORANEI – Carrozzeria Rizieri - PONTEDERA-
• “IL MITO CHE VORREI LASCIARTI” - Torre civica di Bientina - PISA
• “GLI AZZURRI DI “ARTEDONNA”- Limonaia di Palazzo Ruschi PISA
• “IDEARTEMARE”- Villa Bondi - MARINA DI PISA
2009
• “AEROARTE”- -46° aerobrigata- PISA- Sala Circolo Sottufficiali e Comune di Pisa
• MOSTRA PERSONALE ” Segni dell’irrazionale” 21 febbraio-3 marzo Pisa Atrio Comunale,
• “TRACCE DI FUTURO” Collettiva Provincia di LIVORNO
• “ARTEXPO”– Stazione Leopolda -1 ° Rassegna d’Arte Contemporanea - PISA
• MOSTRA PERSONALE – Galleria ”Il cielo in una stanza”9-24 Maggio MODENA
• MOSTRA PERSONALE “Dieci e non più dieci”al “VECCHIO DADO” Pisa(opere dal 1998 al 2008)-1 luglio-30 Settembre 2009
• MOSTRA INTERNAZIONALE DI ARTI VISIVE- Castello Malaspina MASSA
• PREMIO “IL SEGNO” - Galleria Zamenhof -MILANO 19 -29 settembre 2009
• V° INCONTRO ARTISTI CONTEMPORANEI -Carrozzeria Rizieri – PONTEDERA( 26-27 sett. 2009)

2010
• NAVICELLI IN ARTE - Pisa, Navicelli SPA Gennaio 2010
• BIPERSONALE permanente “LA CLESSIDRA”-febbraio Pisa
• RASSEGNA INTERNAZIONALE VERSILIA WINE ART FESTIVAL- PIETRASANTA-LUCCA 24/30 Marzo 2010
• PREMIO INTERNAZIONALE"CITTÀ DI NEW YORK"- Manhattan
• GALLERIA “ARTE CITTÀ AMICA” Torino 27 marzo-3 Aprile 2010
• PERSONALE “GRAFFI E GRAFFITI”- Torre degli Upezzinghi- Calcinaia- Pisa 3 /11 Aprile 2010
• “ARTE D  a  S. ZENO” - 24 Aprile -6 Maggio 2010              PISA
• “ALTRI MONDI”         La Limonaia di palazzo Ruschi 12 Giugno 2010 PISA
• "LA CONSTITUTION ITALIENNE" - FESTA DELL'EUROPA - AMILLY- FRANCE 1-5 Luglio  2010
• “TUTTI ASSIEME ...CROMATICAMENTE”-  Empoli ( Firenze)-1-30 luglio 2010 1-5 Luglio 2010
• “VENTIPERVENTI" RASSEGNA INTERNAZIONALE DEL PICCOLO FORMATO 20 giugno – 20 Luglio 2010 NAPOLI Lineadarte creativa
• "PREMIO NAZIONALE G. GRONCHI"(3° premio) 1-17 Luglio 2010-Centro Otello Cirri- PONTEDERA
• IDEARTEMARE- 10-11 Luglio 2010- TIRRENIA
• RASSEGNA INTENAZIONALE   "FLOGISTO,ARTI IN ERUZIONE"evento inaugurale Museo Magma-24 luglio-31 agosto- ROCCAMONFINA  - CASERTA
• “ VISIBILE È L'INVISIBILE"- - Castel dell'Ovo 8 agosto- 4 Settembre 2010 NAPOLI
• “PERCORSI D’ARTE TOSCANA”- Bottini dell’Olio  2-9 settembre 2010-08-02 LIVORNO
• “L’ARIA FINALMENTE LIBERA”   VI° INCONTRO ARTISTI CONTEMPORANEI” Carrozzeria Rizieri - PONTEDERA
• BIPERSONALE” CONCAVO E CONVESSO”due realtà a confronto-Centro “Le Piagge”   FIRENZE-  25-26 settembre 2010