If I were to indicate the first, immediate impression that the works of the Roman artist Stefania Pinci provoked in me, I would refer to the concept of authentic purity in contrast to the concept of impurity, in the sense I am about to explain.
We live in an extremely impure era, not exactly disastrously, one that is theorizing purity in its most varied forms, whether it be in race, religion, moral beliefs, food, environment, or even art. History tells us this with utmost clarity: it is a degenerate tendency, in any of its manifestations, if it interprets purity, fanatically, as the only truth, the only conceivable path.
Purity, in this context, becomes a cultural abstraction, a dream, an idea of perfection perhaps suited to the laboratory, but far from the lived world, where, instead, the opposite prevails. Because life itself has been and continues to be generated by the mixing of disparate factors, from which hybrids and crossbreeds emerge, capable of better adapting to the environmental conditions they interact with, far from being flawless. The pure, biologically weak, is destined to disappear. The impure, the perfect product of Darwinian selection, is destined for survival.
In Pinci’s paintings, authentic purity is achieved through a primitivist resistance to the beautiful form—clear, clean, smooth—due to a reluctance that is perhaps so physiological that it cannot even be touched, even when one intends to do so.
In the pictorial matter, which largely corresponds to the chromatic aspect, in emulation of what was first practiced by post-impressionist Expressionism, there is a thick, rich, fertile material spread with the roundness of gesture and the healthy generosity of someone buttering a slice of bread.
In resorting to an imagery that is out of the ordinary, with a character that is indeed straightforward and authentic, yet deeply personal in its brut, baroque visionarism, devoid of any adornment, where everything aims to respond to a total frankness of spirit, establishing as direct a relationship as possible with it, offering nothing to studied intention. The more Stefania Pinci is able to immerse herself in the sea of pulsating life, in its sensations, in the instincts it stimulates, in its intense smells, the more her painting proves capable of intercepting the visceral energies in which one can recognize the essence underlying our existence in the world.
In the end, with Pinci, one is convinced of a paradox: to represent the purity that emerges by subtraction from the impurity of the reality around us, a pure spirit is needed, just as the soul of our artist is.
