Margareth Dorigatti

For many years I have appreciated the mystical tension that animates the visions you paint, like a troubled diary exposed to public perusal, troubled because it is heartfelt, fruit of the need to discern light, a way to salvation in life’s mysterious journey.

We’ve known each other for ages, and since the very start I have always felt that your way of expressing yourself exposed a perception of mal de vivre, and was at the same time also a hymn to life, perhaps for the desperate, unflagging need to reach what the poet described as “the midst of a truth”.

Your paintings seek to meld thought and feeling, capturing visual moments made of threads of colour, skilfully handled to suggest outline and nuance. You manage to associate momentary vision and ideal synthesis, the sense of isolated time with the evocative power of a letter mislaid, or never sent, or discovered by chance by someone else who traces the feelings expressed with relative detachment. This is an accomplishment I consider to be ethical as well as aesthetic.

You’re an acute, insightful and occasionally unsparing analyst of your – and our – feelings, dear Margareth. And this way of delving deep into expression and existence is what makes your “Epistolarium” so fascinating: the chromatic grafts, mixed techniques, double surfaces and your astounding technical armory all become part of the picture with the spontaneous emotional strength of a caress, intimating harmony among apparent dissonance. Far from any form of intellectual dalliance, these works speak for the magnetic virtue of achieving poetry in pictorial form.

The greys and blues, the use of gold and glued paper fragments, and above all the words like scraps of personal experience: together they conjure up the insolent rhythm of life lived as it dissolves and yet preserves the passions of experience in time. Everything is harmony, even as you pin down the image that seeks to sound the depths of continuous generation and destruction.

With untiring passion you describe a process in which we are all involved, drawing attention to the intimate connection between the word and our innermost being, inviting the observer to absorb the deep significance of all those “traces” adeptly hidden, preserved or revealed by the paint.

Dear Margareth, this intriguing and highly symbolic visual epistolary is a long letter of impassioned human affinity and boundless faith in the expressive power of painting as an idiom infused with poetry. It’s a rare accomplishment in our present times, and that is why I felt the need to write you a letter, in the hope that not all will be lost and that some trace may remain.

With my warmest wishes and a hug,

Duccio Trombadori

19 August 2022