Born in Taranto (Italy) on 26 march 1954.
Works and lives in Milan.

Life is there, behind the curtain
by Flavio Caroli

The art of Antonella Masetti Lucarella (since here we are talking about a real artist, and this does not happen easily nor frequently) looks to me as essentially consisting of grasping the basic, secret, silent layer of things, identified, ab origine, with the Void, and then recording its intermittent pulses on the scale of Being, until reaching subtle, sudden, frantic ticking, leading, inducing, introducing to the climax, that is to a sporadically whole and total Being, lost, though in the glaucous and numb sea of the Void from which it painfully, very painfully, and maybe desperately wriggles out. This is what Antonella Masetti Lucarella does, using a dense and mature pictorial plot, strong, sometimes even fierce in its tension, or better in the "quality" supporting each individual segment of the image. Schiele, Kitaj, Hockney, who cares … this is the unavoidable legacy of those who still know how to be figurative today.

This is what Antonella Masetti Lucarella manages to do, with a subtlety never to be intended as image gracefulness or "good manners". On the contrary, this is realism, reality or truth (in order to understand these paintings we must, in fact grasp the thrills translating reality and fixing it into truth), in describing the moans, the remote moans betraying a cat's paw leaning in the dark, then the first creakings breaking the silence, and, finally, the lightnings from the void, in other words, life. Life is there, behind the curtain. Its very few laws are there, behind the curtain. Of course we can deceive ourselves into believing to be able to bypass either or both of them. This is what almost all of us do almost always: paying a price. Because distance from the curtain and, even more so, from life, is very similar to the famous gate of Buñuel's Exterminator Angel. It cannot be crossed. Almost never. Not never. In fact, when somebody reaches the no man's land, we can perceive it. We know he is alone, that observing the truth can be extremely attractive, though extremely difficult. We know it may happen maybe only in this mysterious experience men call art. In particular, we know that Antonella Masetti Lucarella is in the open sea, here and now. May God, any God, help her. But we shall follow her, even for an hour, for a minute. Actually this is all what we are asked to do. Maybe for an hour, maybe even for a minute, but we shall not be able to admit we have escaped truth. Truth comes in fluted notes, we said. First it is a figure seen from behind, elegantly dressed, with its back bare, a figure framed by a firm stroke, though twinkling, sensitive to light, as if it was traced by the scalpel of a surgeon; the black of the long gloves tolls on the shining skin; the chignon is highlighted by a flash of pink-mauve flowers; and, outside, there is the world fluidified gouache, the liquefied skin of the Void. The curtain is near, we can see beyond. The world is still, peaceful, and, obviously, Antonella Masetti Lucarella is not interested at all in the so-called elegance. She looks for Seduction, for something beautiful, for the beautiful distant flight of the shoulder blades, for the beautiful neck, so long, so slender, so indescribably open to the methodic path of light. She is interested in the magic of the small black river, flowing along the spine. In the light, in the endless miracles light produces when the cells of the atmosphere mix and blend with those of the skin, embedding into them. Then there is a face: the great mystery. Probably not a specific face, breaking the curtain and allowing us to see reality, enabling reality to look at us in turn through those eyes. We look at truth and are looked at by truth. A renaissance though modern face. This man is made of chiaroscuro miracles, in his plasticity and in his heart, he attracts but is attracted, he lets us observe him and observes us, suspiciously, he embodies the melancholy of Being, but he is in the Being. He lives. As his still and lost eyes tell us. Because eyes are the "windows of the soul". And I do not want to talk about myself, but if you leaf through my book Storia della Fisiognomica, and see the notes of five centuries of geniality, and admire in particular the pages depicting Charles Le Brun's eyes, you will understand why painting insists with special perfidy and despair on this privileged tool of perception of the world.Then the Being, the climax of the Being, like a spider crawling towards the center of the web and of the problem, explodes, silently exploding into the Eros as in a chain reaction of thousand segregate hydrogen bombs. Very chaste, obviously. Selected; and there is no doubt about it. But stabbing. Eros, simply of a feminine body; where only a woman can grasp its most terrible calls.

Who can say why the call, the lust, is hidden in a nipple, just emerging from behind a slightly pressing overhanging arm, appearing as if it really couldn't avoid the kiss of light? Who can say why does the call work this way, and only this way? The call could be increased tenfold by a small, supreme tuft of black hair, protruding from an armpit (everything protrudes: since nothing can be imprisoned), the hair protrude anarchically. And the climax of the call shall become true when the look, anxiously raising above a shoulder, the mouth and the nose, meets the eyes, that is the soul. Defying eyes. Receptive eyes. Possessing and greedy eyes. Nature eyes, nature with its laws for the preservation of the specie. Nobody can tell why lust works this way and only this way, just as nobody can say why stars exist. This is the face of truth, beyond the curtain. This is the truth discovered and revealed by Antonella Masetti Lucarella.

Nobody can tell why in a sleeping Nude, magic concentrates in one point, just one point, the perspective point of our eye and of everything else, the dimple, the negligible dimple (pity for the poor in spirit!) forming just there, where the thigh and the nates meet.None can tell why the furious Eros of a standing Nude, headless this time, therefore without soul, (and as we all understand, this is the ultimate bet: the discovery of the mechanical, scientific Eros, that is the truth of the detail intended as science of the detail); none can understand why this immediate and overwhelming Eros is composed of four elements which, like an explosive mixture, cannot react without a fifth element. The four components are: statuesque flesh, mainly represented by the hiding and crushing thighs-claws; the armpits, luxuriant with parted hair; the large nipples on tiny breasts, contrasting with the powerful thighs; the carefully combed pubic triangle. The fifth, essential element is obviously the claret red stockings. Not red. Not black. Claret red. Demure and dense, balancing all this spasmodic and promised lust. Actually, nobody can say practically anything, because nobody hardly understands anything. In order to understand, we need to embark for the no man's land. We are grateful to Antonella Masetti Lucarella to have embarked in this voyage also for us.

The Black: light, substance or place, space
by Roberto Sanesi

I believe we should reasonably start from the black, from its physical, symbolic features, despite the uncertainty, at least for now, about whether this is light or substance - or place, space, stage; in any case an essential element for the apparition. But we need to perceive and define the subtler, maybe still ambiguous meaning, of an image; the one more resistant to the first, emotional, often temporary impression, which otherwise could be even too easily ascribed to a simple ruse. Black, forcing the boundaries, misleadingly intensifies. It can add "mystery" to a full or an empty space, thanks to its ability to dissimulate both conditions, while its truth, if we can say so, is only demonstrated in the analogy between what it is and what appears in it, and between the components of the apparition. Black is justified in the evident function of light. Light always legitimates it, confirming its precise relation with the forms it seems to produce beyond the surface, which would otherwise be absorbed by it. Black is "necessary" to those forms only by being part of them.

Therefore we must immediately realize that black, in Antonella Masetti Lucarella's paintings is not a background. Not even when a curtain explicitly indicates the intention to reveal the false-true interplay of theater, as in some triptychs sometimes even too cut-out and locked. The risk is to subdue, sometimes, the enigmatic power of the recurrent sequences of small mounds or Golgotha full of bare trees, created by Antonella Masetti Lucarella - fragmentary emblems, more or less deliberately evoked, of a vital energy, indirect reflections on an enriching process essential in order to understand the images, the total motives of this painting style. The same motives which are more evident in her female nudes. These aspects, more deeply covered by Flavio Caroli in an essay written in 1995, highlight a Seductive element described in detail, now melt in her more recent works, in order to disperse beyond the limits of the bodies - as if Eros was not only inside the painted figure, but also in the look of those watching it, and where black is the mediator of the whole process, as if keeping the effect suspended, sometimes invading a profile, others leaving it to be identified in a leaden light through contrast. The eyes of her characters are still or closed. They are not expressionless: they ecstatically turn their gaze inwards. When they are closed, it is because they are listening. As in the recurrent case of the violinists, witnessing an internalization of the subject, introducing the painting as a music score. This seem to be contradicted by a solid female nude painted in 1997, but is confirmed, on the contrary, with the lack of expressiveness of the face and its blind solidity. In general, especially in her previous works, the eventual sensuality is restrained, when not denied, by the formal linearity of the traits, by the almost total lack of supplementary, decorative elements: no Baudelaire style bijoux sonores, for instance, despite the suspicion of some slight perversity. Distance is what mysteriously adds depth (black, absorbing and reverberating at the same time). Firm images, sometimes using bold merciless strokes, maybe with a hint of Schiele or, even better, of Hans Baldung Grien, composedly though, without dramatic complacency, to mark the passing of time, leaving aversion to beauty implied - almost ignoring all expressive gesturality, except for what we can now sense more openly and in any case differently, in the dispersed fragments, hands, eyes, broken profiles, shaded faces, a breast, a pubis. Notes, quotations, as in the pages of some recovered codex, all this rendered through the transparence, consumption in the mastery of a lovingly sketched drawing, accurate and tender. A drawing reaffirming, not only from a technical standpoint, a nostalgia for the body, emerging or maybe on the verge of disappearance, but refusing to give up its testimony.

And since we have to talk about the meaning, of the written signs, in this new mechanism of Antonella Masetti Lucarella's figures, readable and unreadable signs, besides their function to make the pictorial matter even more sensitive, we cannot consider incidental the fact that the expressive context avails - at least in one case - of some verses of a poet like Whitman. Whatever the text, we immediately sense that there can be no distance between signs and figures, and that these scansions of space indicate a research and a celebration of the body, a physicality open to the metaphor. Visible, readable statements don't prevail - when words are isolated and evident, concepts risk to be limited to captions; space is defined by the strategy of the writing signs in their complexity: interfering with the strokes of the drawing, gaining expression equality, becoming an undifferentiated substance, where the immediately recognizable data continuously bounce back. Signs become mediators just like black color (some fragments, or even better, ligaments of the black still remain here and there) overcoming the full-empty, internal-external distinctions.

Color too contributes; it highlights, dissolves, enriches, becomes part of the system of ambiguities, featuring chiaroscuro in all its possible facets - originating the multiple, elusive and therefore evocative indications created by this style of painting.

Translation by Silvio Cohe