Coming from place where painting, acting and dancing coexist in a perfect and somewhat poetic balance, Beatrice Meoni has been giving freedom of speech to her expressive power and is becoming a more and more relevant artistic figure in today’s contemporary art world.
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Born in Florence, in 1960, Beatrice Meoni has always been involved in aesthetics, working in close contact with the world of scenography, as a stage decorator and as an administrator in lyric poetry, prose and dancing. Throughout the years, Meoni’s desire and attraction towards painting developed slowly and found its spark thanks to the artist’s interest around the act of observation and the expressive potential that lies in the medium’s linguistic possibilities. As the artist states herself: “It was a very slow approach that developed gradually over time and which, at a certain point, became evident in practice. Everything happened through many steps, today I can say necessary, to discover the practice and exercise of looking”.
Beatrice Meoni’s research, places itself at a meeting point between figurativeness and abstraction, a stage where everyday objects and forms find themselves reinvented and conveying a different and inedited meaning. What remains on the canvas’ surface is a trail made of clues and subtle indications, a path where a variety of traces indicate the previous existence of forms, shapes and meanings, all of which have been transposed into a new significance. When diving into Meoni’s paintings, we find ourselves invested by a feeling of déjà-vu, disoriented by a sensation that makes us believe that we are actually glancing at something we know very well, but without understanding fully what it actually is; an empty space, the one constantly present in Beatrice Meoni’s canvases; “where emptiness is a place of occurrence for things that never happen while someone is watching”, the artist underlines. A place that expresses the feeling of something that has just appeared, or is about to show, but is not for us to see.
The observer is only allowed to see its presence, but not its truth and its complete form, as if it was hidden by the Veil of Maya. An interruption of sight, which is put before our eyes to protect the image from its exploitment and pornography. This particular element elevates Meoni’s paintings to the Olympus of expressiveness, due to the clever and mature usage of the romantic power that lies in ambiguity and mysteriousness. In contemporary times, where icons and objects are abused by the viewer’s need for simplicity and positiveness, where beauty is subject to what Edmund Burke called smoothness and is fully exploited, Beatrice Meoni chooses to focus on a more romantic and less explicit aspect of aesthetics, leaving a vacuum for the observer to fill with his inner fantasies and feelings.
