Anna Actis Caporale

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About artist

Anna Actis Caporale is a photographer but above all a painter born in 1951 in Mazzè, where she still lives.

Although she has always loved to paint, she has studied economics and business and worked in banking. However, she has never renounced to cultivate interests in the artistic field - stimulated by the family context thanks to the influence of her father Aldo, a well-known landscape painter who especially painted her native land, Canavese, and her brother Sergio, who unfortunately passed away prematurely. As a young man inspired in particular by Expressionism, other passions soon diverted her attention from this: travel, photography and archaeology became the main focus. In fact, Anna Actis Caporale has created two photo albums entitled "China" and "Morocco", in collaboration with the writer and art expert Guido Forneris - as evidence of the exploration of the homonymous countries in 1982, and in the 1980s as well as in 2011. Since she was a child fascinated by the millenary and mysterious Chinese culture, she listened to the stories of a great-uncle who lived in China and Taiwan for almost fifty years and, as soon as possible, she went there. Equally seduced by the Moroccan imperial cities and markets teeming with life, by the Atlas Mountains where the Berbers took refuge to escape the Arab invaders, by the stratifications of the rocks laid bare to tell of a succession of geological eras since the place was a seabed and by the desert as the kingdom of nomads. These references are deepened in her works in which, in the first person, she often still today transports herself to raise kites and herself to fly in beautiful hot-air balloons as she desired as a child. And it is precisely by taking inspiration from the sensations and perceptions collected in the many now called expeditions that the artist has also created paintings with an exotic and sometimes fairy-tale flavor, with animals, insects, trees and flowers for subjects that are the transposition and the result of sudden lightning solicited by the surrounding environment. Report no less than the psychic activity that takes place in sleep and emotions that populate the personal memory. Not by chance, the artist herself said: "Travelling means knowledge and confrontation with different realities. For me, painting is a journey through ideas, impressions, colors, feelings and experiences. And sometimes even dreams... So here are my Travels and Mirages". However, it was only in 2000 that the woman decided to turn her life around and put her intense experiences on canvas. Thus were born precisely the above mentioned "Journeys and Mirages" in which everything - images, sounds, smells -, Anna explained, contributes to forming a harmonious whole that goes beyond the simple landscape. About these Vittorio Sgarbi commented <<It is the exoticism, understood not as an attraction for the picturesque tourist but as a motivated interest for the culturally different, the element that most characterizes the art of Anna Actis Caporale (...) that in the figurative expression condenses through symbols and impressions as the existential experience of the journey has left on her. The enamelled color renounces the volume and depth of the space to concentrate on the tactile density and contrast of the stamps, almost as if to recover the sensorial aspect of memory, in terms that sometimes seem to exasperate similar inclinations of Aldo Mondino>>. It should also not be overlooked that Mazzè is the author of numerous illustrations for books such as "Racconti fantastici" and "Mazzè, porta del Canavese. La grande storia di un piccolo paese", both by Livio Barengo and "Le mele d'oro" by Matteo Gallenca. She in fact knows well the enchantment of the extraordinary and mythical narrating (especially the magnificent yellow and blue of the, she loved, oriental light). The Actis Caporale not infrequently explained that brushing makes her feel good with herself and her surroundings; and said that, in this regard, she is constantly reminded of a statement by Hermann Hesse who, during an interview, said that painting is a form very close to meditation. Certainly unforgettable the famous phrase of the naturalized Swiss German writer, poet, aphorist, philosopher and painter Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946 <<Painting is wonderful, it makes one more cheerful and more patient. Afterwards you do not have black fingers as when you write, but red and blue>>.Finally, participating in various Collectives and expo, remember the presence of Anna Actis Caporale at Arte Padova from 2015 to 2019 and at Arte Genova in 2016 and 2017; the exhibition Tamara De Lempicka and Miami meets Milan both last year, the Biennale Milano 2019, and the Pro Biennale di Venezia in 2019 and 2020. Among the Personals, one at the Galleria Rinascenza Contemporanea in Turin in 2018 and another at the Eco Art Gallery, Hotel Statuto.