Testi critici EN

2005

Barbara Goebels 

Laura Grosso leaves Rome, main subject of her paintings, for Anzio, popular city on the coast of Lazio. 

Gentle breeze, hazy beach, summer feeling - the artist catches this special mood in her bathing scenes. People, children are wading in the ripples of the smooth Mediterranean Sea, bathing or playing in the sand.

Bathing scenes magically attracted painters throughout Art History. Especially in Impressionism the new painting technique bore reference to the play of light and many artists created light-flooded seascape.

The delineation of hazy sea air, due to the aerosols above the water, was a challenge.

In her work Laura Grosso is concerned about light and its impact on colors, its power to structure space and build  a three-dimensionality within the painting.

In Laura Grosso's Roman Vedute, the translucent light, characteristic for Mediterranean regions, plays a vital role. Reflecting on urban structure, it precisely defines the shape of famous historical buildings in the Citta Eterna, creating contrasts through shadow.  

In Laura Grosso's Sea-Side paintings the artist experiences the effect of light on human forms. These respond to light in a quite different way than static structures.  Figures  become colored stains, abstract forms and space is used by the principle of atmospheric perspective. With this technique of 'sfumatura', an impression of  lightness and vastness is created.

Laura Grosso uses non-primary colors, so called Mezzatinta, each with the admixture of the complementary hue in order to reduce and thus refine their saturation. From pale ocher to grey and blue, they are gradated to harmonious compositions of width. On some  of the painting panels, beach, sea , horizon and sky appear  as vertical layers. Here the artist uses the impasto technique, thick layers of oil paint.

Impastoed paint makes the light reflect in a particular way and permits a special texture on the painting. In some works painting- knife strokes are visible and create an almost sculptural effect.

Laura Grosso's Seaside Paintings as the Roman Vedute, rendered in different painting techniques create a stunning atmospheric impression of natural and urban spaces. 

"Seaside Paintings"

1992

Philip Pearlstein

Laura Grosso understands that yesterday’s world is the one that we live in. In old Rome we walk on last century’s lava stone streets between Medieval, Renaissance and 19th century tenement walls, all colored in varied shades of earthy yellows. Occasionally vistas open. Ancient Roman ruins are abruptly there in front of us. Sculptured figures are plunked about. However, every glimpse down the street looks familiar; we already know the vistas. And yet contemporary painters, artists schooled in all the varied phases of modernism, still want to create paintings out of those glimpses. Laura Grosso is one of those artists in thrall to the visual experience of Rome, and has chosen to paint it. It takes a great deal of nerve for a young artist today who is ambitious to make a mark as an artist, to choose Rome as her subject and to paint it so directly. There is such a long and daunting history of depicting Rome in paint. From the straightforward cartographic to the picturesque; heroic Piranesi to expressionistic Kokoshka. Rome and its countryside has been depicted in every major historical style and emotional pitch. How can a contemporary artist circumvent that history?                                      Grosso chooses to concentrate on capturing through paint the light of the city, and simply ignores the history of styles. She also pays no attention to the array of contemporary styles, those of “concept art”, “politically correctness’, or “magic realism”. Instead, by concentrating on the fleeting qualities of light, Grosso bypasses sentiment, sociology and the politics of picturesqueness. She allows the forms that fall into her view to build their own abstract relationships in a manner reminiscent of Morandi, and she finds magic in the straightforward depiction of those forms. “Optical correctness” becomes the equal of “political correctness”. Laura Grosso elevates the act of concentrated seeing and it’s recreation through paint, to equal status with those other styles.

"Painting Yesterday’s World Today" , a letter by Philip Pearlstein