Ana Negro: Fragments of Being

Stefania Severi.  2006.  Roma.  Catalogo Il Saggiatore. 

Ana Negro is an artist who entrusts the body with the duty of objectifying her idea of the world, with all its beauties and all its tragedies. Bodies, alike and different, are an image of the whole mankind, as born out of its Creator’s hand, naked and helpless, heroic in its frailty. The Argentine painter’s vision is overtly anthropocentric, as it was for the artists of Ancient Greece and the great Michelangelo. Both with these great figures and neoclassical artists, the woman painter shares the idea that the naked human body is the expression of a universal and suprahistorical condition. His humanity takes on the characters of all races, without identifying itself with anyone specifically. In this regard, the use of white colour is emblematic to define bodies, since white is the synthesis of all other colours.

Ana Negro has long been devoting herself to study the human body, thereon experimenting the dynamics relating to gesture and posture and mutual connection between the different bodies. The tension born from the dialectis of body pieces and pieces with background, which becomes pervasive because of the prevailing use of black, exalts the “full-empty” dichotomy even in symbolical sense. It is as if one intended to underscore the loneliness of mankind with respect to other people, and that sort of remote sky laden with overhanging fixed stars.

Despite the substantial unity of research into the topic of the human being, inside such research one can see manifest changes and developments. Rarely are bodies represented as a whole because the eye only manages to capture them into fragments. The viewpoint is increasingly more “ex-centric”, so that figures take on positions which sometines cannot be recognized immediately. The effect is on the verge of abstraction, with bodies becoming valleys, hills, abysses, and mountains. Mankind into fragments, a symbol of the current status where values are altered, and human integrity is at stake.

Nevertheless, these fragments of being also nestle a winding and deep feeling of compassion, that honest grief arising from the suffering of other people enticing us to find suitable relief. A circular feeling derives from uniting spectator with author, and it operates in a circuit known as the mystery of life and death.

The fragments of being that Ana Negro presents to our admiration and our reflection are no “easy” painting, nor is it “easy” the art which confronts the great issues of existence. Her painting is a production of high expertise and most refined identity and immediate recognition. In particular, we emphasize change in colour quality, in regard to preceding works where dichronomy was netter. Here, even in substantial contrast, we can find quality black and white where underlying complex chromatisms are revealed, with less brilliant brushstrokes and muffled contrasts applying a touch of “earth” which joins both ends. Her painting imposes a voluntary choice, which makes an appeal to human values, and wakes up sleepy consciousness. And she does so without historically identifiable indications, with a suprahistorical idea, in the fields of philosophy and myth, because “evil” today may be identified in this or that historical subject, and tomorrow it could be something different, without changing its negative substance.

Let’s recognize ourselves in the humanity that Ana Negro forcefully places before our eyes. Let’s preserve our unicity and absoluteness, but also let’s feel ourselves close to our fellowmen.

(English translation by María Herminia Alonso)