While I’m on my way to interview Veronica, I feel a little bit nervous. This is going to be my first interview, and only wielding a small notebook and a half-working pen, I’m getting closer to my appointment, surrounded by a shiny blue sky.
After we met, this girl with a shy attitude but with wide eyes of the same colour of the blanket above our heads, confesses that it’s going to be her first interview and that she’s worried. Comforting each others, we dealt with our “first time”, both with a hand on our eyebrows to protect us from the shiny sun.
Veronica Brugnerotto, born the 27th September 1995 is enrolled at the fourth year at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, after she have studied at the artistic course at the High School in Treviso. She tells me about how she found out since she was child that this was the road she wanted to walk on, while instead of listening to the lectures of her teacher she used to draw a bell tower jutting from the window; however, the first times in the Academic School haven’t been easy.
“My mind was completely messy, but I fortunately worked out the situation by doing what I was good at: iper realistic portraits. Now instead, I’m undressing them: my paintings are muted and I hope that the colours, at the end, will talk for me. Also as my own voice.”
At this point I had to ask her if she has some artists from whom she inspires from, and I initially managed to take two names out of her speech: Max Neumann and Luc Tuymans. But that wasn’t enough, because I felt that she was telling me about them only on a technical level. I knew there was something else. I had the feeling that something was missing in all that fuel that allowed her to go straight from intermediate school to the Venice Academic following just her own ideas.
While I keep going on with my investigation, Veronica tells me of how much of a role have the primary colours for her. How she actually manages to obtain all the others chromatic graduation and how she always strives to find the right amount of the primary ones. Last but not least, she really wants to take the white on a step above all other colours, to a level of considering it as a primary color.
“My works might bewilder you, but on one hand that’s actually what I want. Because at the end of the day, we can already understand realism. For me the void is full of colour and the white, instead, holds all the meanings.”
With this catchphrase she manages to briefly include how did she evolved in these last four years: starting from an iper realistic point of view and then, step by step, to start a research of the undressing of her subjects, in order to mess with us. Let’s say, she really wants to put us in an uncomfortable situation, or at least that’s what I think. And it’s in this precise moment that Veronica finally unlock her deepest love, since she was just a baby, for René Magritte and for how he managed the empty spaces, giving depth and weight at the human figure, while still being flat on a painting. Did I finally succeed into painting Veronica herself?
For the whole interview I tried not to ask her too many aimed questions, because I understood at least one thing that day: for her, from the moment she formulates an idea or a shape of her expression, it’s not art anymore. And even if I’d love to call her as a kind of a saboteur tranquille, I can’t do it and I don’t want to do it. Because Veronica is more and more then that, she’s the void and colour in constant evolution. Actually, she doesn’t really deserve a definition, or at least that’s what I think she would prefer. And that’s why I now stop to tell you about her. Now it’s your turn.
“We are our own mates and I elaborate everything from my point of view” – says Veronica.
“I’m who I am” – said the Marchese in La Locandiera of Carlo Goldoni.
I say: “Taste it”.
Marco Cossaro
EATART 