Giulia Corradetti and the universe: from enigmatic poetry to artificial nature.

Magazine article "Piceno 33" - by Valentina Falcioni

Giulia Corradetti is an artist from Ascoli, born in 1982, a perceptive woman, endowed with deep introspective abilities and at the same time an acute investigator of the universe that from an enigmatic poem with time has turned into a dull little tune, covered with a depressing synthetic, artificial nature. Giulia has felt her propensity for visual art grow among the school desks and has seen her expressive language mature together with a personal stylistic style along the educational path completed at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna and obviously through the edifying flow of life in the majestic labyrinth of the visible spirit.

The first time I let my eyes run over Corradetti’s works, I thought back to a line from Alphonse Allais’ The Black Cat: “God did not create blue food. He wanted to reserve blue for the sky and the eyes of some women”. The attention the artist pays to nature, which generously fills man’s first need, wants to guide the observer towards a reflection that in recent years has involved researchers and public opinion. Food over the centuries has been the object of interest by ethno-anthropologists, as it is not only a mere means of survival, but a valid yardstick for judging and understanding human progress. Analyzing the evolutionary history of food, in fact, offers the possibility of fully understanding the intrinsic relationship between a given population and its territory, between a country and the economic, socio-cultural and epidemiological factors that define its degree of well-being.

The contrast between the genuineness of food products grown according to traditional techniques and the artificiality of those genetically manipulated organisms that can develop irreversible effects on ecosystems, is immediately recognizable in the sharp contrast between the bright and lush colors of vegetables and the aseptic white of those cubes in Giulia Corradetti’s works that allude to the devices of a technology now invasive. The evolutionary history of food is perfectly capable of outlining the anthropological-cultural path of a people and the works belonging to the Artficial Nature cycle offer us a true and disarming fresco of contemporary society. The community seems to have forgotten the wisdom of the fathers, the respect for the spontaneity of nature and the wisdom recognizable in the words of Hippocrates: “Let food be your medicine and your medicine be food”.

An element that seems to stand out from the other spurious entities in the work Artificial Nature #12, also exhibited in Milan in the group show Mangiare il Bene curated by Nikla Cingolani, is undoubtedly the snail that symbolizes the slow and gradual path of the natural universe towards a regenerative prosperity. The scroll engraved in its shell recalls Fibonacci’s numerical series and since ancient times alludes to a spiral and phlegmatic path that inevitably leads to a prolific and lasting goal. It is no coincidence that the Latin word lentus is also synonymous with tenacity, the same that guides a newborn child to the discovery of food that is not only nourishment but pure, atavistic and instinctive pleasure. What jumps to our eyes like a surreal cosmos, in which flowers with a fascinating ancient profile emerge from floating spheres, archaic plants germinate from sterile boxes equipped with switches, anemones, roses and sea tomatoes explode from fluorescent and iridescent screens, actually echo the words of Buddha Siddhārtha Gautama: “Just as the bee collects the juice of flowers without damaging their color and scent, so the wise man dwells in the world”.