Here there are pieces of night, a cut, substantial, breathing and ribbed one, black on black superposed and combined which breed diverse, coordinated and moving deployments of transparencies and wall opaqueness, of secret brightness, of shiny and matt effect. And, « Behind what we call light, it is only about the difference between two darknesses. » (Adonis)
Sandra Sanseverino’s paintings take us into the experience of a pictorial night, simple and sumptuous at the same time, which appear to us as an Epiphany and swallow us deep into its abyss of laminated but nevertheless enlightened blackening. The artist releases herself, all through a patient progress of learning, both from temptations of the too loquacious figure and from the too narrative movement of the self; she also abandoned, because of pictorial extent, the too graphic operations, involved in drawings and fictitious ideograms made in Indian ink, where her passion for the black (which she calls » colour of concentration, meditation, interiority ») however found a first place of fruitful exercise. The artistic lighthouses which mobilize her admiration could well go from The Greco to Whistler (Nocturne), from Rembrandt and Goya to Rothko (Paintings of Houston Chapel). She joins this family just to honour it with her specific contribution.
Working, delivering, meditating and showing the visual powers of the vast pigmentary range of black material opening on the frequenting of the invisible and relating this chromatic night’ demiurgy to some privileged space schemas (verticality, rise, intertwining) practised within large variety, flexibility and sharpness: so could we design, just simplifying it, the main frames in which the artist concentrates, with asceticism, the acting of her creative exploration. Three sweet black flames, or flat asphalted jets, rise here from a standing and velvety night; or an opened central verticality, lit up by grey colour and by modalities of anthracite and white tracks, exalts there a dense night layer surrounded with the crossings of a kind of irregular railing loose like a distended net; somewhere else, deregulated squares harmonize an improbable stained glass of nights and lights’ echos …
Some paintings are named Trees, others have just No title on it, but all of them are full of sense, they are just inflexible both to the vacuity of a simple formal plastic game and to the talkative and simplistic symbolism. She gives us then a dense and staged sensitive and spiritual experience to live which goes from the sensuality to a kind of the sublime; from an alive natural feeling, made of dark, raised and linked forest rhythms, to signs of « religious » kind (crossings, crosses, railing, movements of assumption, illumination, covering, unveiling, etc.) but free from any local obedience, raised in the status of opened and universal symbols. Last repercussion: an effect of sacrality and « mystic » silence. In Sandra Sanseverino’s paintings, the night of the nature and the night of the mystics cross, glorify and animate reciprocally. (And we remember that the artist lived in her native Argentina for several years, in a house in the middle of the forest, and that she is mentally impregnated with Teresa de Avila, Juan de la Cruz and Maître Eckhart).
Bruno Duborgel