BIOGRAPHY OF THE WELL KNOWN ARTIST  TERESA NOTO

The artist Teresa Noto in her house study

Teresa Noto lives in her home- studio in Correggio Micheli, a village near Bagnolo San Vito in the Province of Mantua.

She attended  high school and artistic academic courses of anatomy and while she was studying the history of Art more deeply she was fascinated by the chiaroscuro effects in Caravaggio who, along with Trans-avant-garde expressiveness, influenced her artistic production in the eighties.

In her early years she began to experiment  artistic tecniques in a personal manner.

In 1978 she began to use oil in her paintings and ten years later, in 1986,  her works were shown in Casalmaggiore at a personal exhibition which wasfollowed by the cycle ‘Eros among the Angels’ in Garda in 1988. One year later, with ‘At the origins of Eros’, she inaugurated a new exhibition in San Benedetto Po.

She took part in exhibitions with other artists in  town and in the Province of Mantua as well as in Emilia Romagna.

There were further shows also in the nineties and her works were appreciated by a demanding public.

At first her production  was characterized by the sign of figuration, suspended between declared citations of the line of heroic and visionary art that goes from Michelangelo to Fussli. The late romantic German currents and the picture of the unconscious of  expressionism  that comes from beyond the Alps were other sources of inspiration of the artist whose pictures had their origin from psyche and from the re-visitation of myth.

The dreamlike pictures and the disassembly of the symbolic narration in Teresa Noto’s big works were thoroughly analyzed by art critics such as Erbesato, Monteforte, Andreotti, Bartoli who had studied the growth and maturation of the artist’s imagerie.

In the cycle ‘Mythology’, which was introduced by Bartoli on the occasion of  Teresa Noto’s personal exhibition at the Duke’s Palace in Mantova in 1991, the artist worked with burning impastos and newklimtian gold to individualize the feminine origin in a process of  self-identification that refers to myth and surreal transcription and to justify that the image originates only from a process of interior inspiration.

At that time the artist’s painting that was more and more lyric, and obsessive at the same time, needed to look at the contemporary currents and especially at the figurative worrying declensions of the protagonists of the Italian Trans-avant-garde,

from Chia and Cucchi to Paladino.

The stages in Teresa Noto’s artistic production  could be seen in some of the exhibitions she held in Follonica near Grosseto and in Manerbio in 1992 and 1993, in Sondrio, in Stellata near Bondeno and in Rapallo in 1994, in Spoleto and Pietrasanta in 1995 as well as in collective shows in New Orleans in Louisiana where her works were  very appreciated by a lot of art critics.

A further step in her latest works was characterized by a rarefaction of matter and figuration which were followed by  geometry and spatial scanning.

With the cycle of the ‘Cathedrals’, dated 1996-1999, introduced by Mauro Corradini at the Duke’s Palace in Mantova in an exhibition whose title was ‘The geometry of the Spirit’, Teresa Noto  reached a high artistic level with a painting woven in the light  that seemed to mean the conquest of the sky. Her big crosses made into a thick grid of rhomboidal stitches emerging from the threshold of the imaginary where the abstraction and theosophical kandinschian tensions represented the momentary landing.

In the 2000s her search will lead her to a certain spatial symbolism characterized by the sublimation of matter that will be an inexhaustible search for the expressiveness of the matter itself.

The artist’s achievement could be seen in exhibitions held respectively at the Fashion District in Bagnolo San Vito in 2005, with an introduction made by Vittorio Sgarbi, in Mantua at the BAM MPS, ‘From Myth to Logos’, in 2006, with an introduction by Giorgia Cassini, and at the Duke’s Palace in Revere in 2007.

CRITICAL ANTHOLOGY

Matter as Primary Source

Teresa Noto is a painter in line with another time. She has definitely crossed the threshold, making figuration, if not abstraction, the exclusive field of action in her search for expression. In Noto's work the only past to consider is the historical avant-garde.

The problem of expression here is confronted openly with a unique motive, extending a mental dimension that exceeds the physical borders of her works, with color playing a fundamental role in connecting these dimensions. Noto’s art is a way to comprehend matter as the primary source of any artistic expression. Everything comes from matter, from the potential that it contains. The artist is no demiurge, that invents from nothing, but rather a midwife, who supports matter, reads it, interprets it, and establishes a vital relation with it, without ever forgetting that it is “Grand-mother”. Matter is the essence of nature, and placing oneself in relation to it is to establish a symbolic rite through which man searches for equilibrium in nature, a sense of existence, and the dignity of thinking inside something so extraordinarily vast and apparently inscrutable.

Noto is also reflected in the matter when she seems to twist it, to modify it an arbitrary and very personal way.

 Any manipulation is allowed if it turns to matter and if the matter it becomes itself expression.

Understanding the world is not something that derives solely from cold rationality.

It is generated by the poetry of things, and it comes from the conviction that meaning arises not with mathematical formulas, but with lyrical intuition.

This is the contribution the artist Teresa Noto can give our lives.

Vittorio Sgarbi

From myth to logos

Teresa Noto is one of the most interesting personalities on the contemporary art scene: there is no doctrine to adequately describe her painting. She creates works that swing between the figurative and the abstract, in which she never expresses axiomatic meanings for or against the paintings' representation: the figurative retrieves the painting from the past, unraveling the thread of abstraction in a composition that naturally revitalizes the ancient and engenders the co-existence of naturalism and abstraction.

The exhibition “From Myth to Logos” is dedicated to Noto's more recent work: paintings and themes in which she realizes a pictorial quality and a style, impressive for its creative energy, that she has most recently adopted. The works are organically arranged for chromatic consonance, scansion, and contraposition.

The key to Noto's work is her reflection on the materials. She advances a technical-pictorial investigation, using different media on canvas, board, and plexiglass, where she develops their correlations and achieves an extraordinary “visual poetry”.

Noto’s painting material derives from a passionate and meticulous technique that is rich in invention and effect. In her works the quest for a visual language is articulated through the physical presence of the materials negotiated, which, through process and accumulation, transcend their material origins. They become an opportunity for the observer to commune intimately with the artist. They are intense and introspective material works, where color is impregnated with the spirit of existence, of history, and of tradition, giving life to splendid evocations and epiphanies of a cosmic symbol in lyric terms that synesthetically touch the sensibility of observer. It is Noto's passion for painting, for representation, and for the language of words and signs that sharpens her ability to see. Looking beyond deception of the senses and the inexorable laws of the time and of the space, she adopts the use of extended visual perception. She follows a rigorous logic, where the vision has an intermediate dimension between the observer and the physical reality. Acting as a sort of the microscope and altering parameters, Noto adopts particular filters that capture and show something that is neither reality nor anything of reality that we can perceive with our senses. The vision is a deliciously enchanting act of will.

While some of the works may at first appear to be abstract, a more thorough examination will reveal them to be rich in deeper meaning, surprising revelations of a reality that is rediscovered in the multiple facets of its totality, and all of it is intertwined with references and citations, connections and analogies. A very precise philosophy guides Noto's hand.

                                                                       Giorgia Cassini

                                               Art Historian

The studio of Teresa Noto is a sorceress

Emerging from the studio of Teresa Noto over the course of her career is an opus that is as unique and it is multiform, ranging (in phases) from an ethereally figurative to a materially abstract representation and back (in phases) again. In a process reminiscent of the medieval alchemist's quest for the lapis philosophorum, Noto transmutes her material--and for her the matter is always the matter--into timeless frames of multiple meaning that are both aesthetically charming and intellectually challenging.

Employing the traditional oil and acrylic of her craft as the catalyst in this transformation, she begins with a variety of diverse and eclectic base materials from iron, bronze, and gold to cement and clay and she molds and shapes their amorphous mass on canvass, board, and plexiglas, achieving an exquisite transcendence of the inorganic to an organic whole. Her methods for years have remained as constant as her objective: to reveal the inner essence of the materials she uses, to give voice to their yearning for form and purpose, and, in an absolutely Aristotelian sense, to efficiently feed their acorn and fashion their oak.

The thread of inspiration that informs Noto's works runs from Michelangelo and Caravaggio to Miró and Kandinsky, and the themes represented in them are drawn from a multitude of seemingly irreconcilable sources: physics and metaphysics, history and myth, theology and psychology. But the language they speak is one in which all conflict is resolved and all dialectic dissolved: it is a mysterious and mystical idiom, a lingua franca of mute quiescence. It is this mother tongue of all meaning, this visual poetry, that has always been the goal of Noto's spiritual quest, and she has achieved it through the transubstantiation, the sublimation, of her media. This is her will, and it will remain her legacy.

 The artist's works Teresa Noto you insert in the catalog "Assonances"

 "Notturno"

2004 - mixed technique on painting -  cm 104x120

"Spazio Inorganico"

2004 -  mixed technique on painting - cm 104x132

The artist Well known Teresa Noto actively takes part in the artistic life preparing personal and collective importing shows in various Italian and foreign towns receiving flattering assents from the criticism