Sculpture bronze, 1/1 unique, dimensions: 71 cm x 16 x 11 cm, 2021, signed E Rossano 2021, on base, not numbered
Ewa Rossano
Graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw with a diploma in painting and from the Academy of Fine Arts in Strasbourg with a diploma in sculpture and glass. Member of ZPAP and LMaisondes Artistes. She has been creating for 30 years, finds herself best in sculpture and does not identify with a particular trend in art - she considers her work to be innovative. In art, she is most interested in man and his duality and complexity. The artist "speaks with her hands" - her fingers are faster than words, they are the ones that are better able to express what she cannot express by speaking.Working on a new piece of art, Eve Rossano always starts with a crystal, which for her is an echo of fragility, represents our spiritual side and evokes everything that connects us to the air and sky. The next step in the creation of the piece is to carve in wax the part that will later be cast in bronze. The bronze evokes the physical side, the more stable side, represents everything that connects us to the Earth and our human condition, and complements the crystal part. In turn, the colors used in the sculptures evoke the artist's painterly roots. In Ewa Rossano's sculptures, the marriage of bronze and crystal is an image of the coexistence of two worlds that coexist in each of us: strength and fragility, visible and invisible, physical and spiritual. Thanks to the technique chosen by the artist, each sculpture created in one piece is unique.
She is the author of award statues and monumental sculptures. She has participated in many individual and group exhibitions, including numerous foreign exhibitions such as: "365 Days of Emotions" - Italy, France, Luxembourg, Iceland (2015-2021); "Parallel Traces" - Georgia, Serbia, Romania, Spain, Poland (2019); Bastille Art Fair, Paris, France (2014); Salon of Contemporary Art in Toulon (Grand Prix Award), France (2003).
ZOFIA GEBGARD AT EWA ROSSANO
She is bilingual on many levels. Starting with the fact that she is Polish-French and a sculptor and painter. And further, that her work is based on a clash, or perhaps rather a dialogue of opposites - matter, emotion, reflection....
She studied painting in Wroclaw, and sculpture in Strasbourg. It was there that she learned the process of casting bronze for lost wax and the process of melting glass using the pate de verre method. Fascinated, captivated by the alchemy of these technologies, she remained faithful to them, and the combination of bronze and glass became her favorite mode of expression.
She says she has a nomadic soul and could live anywhere, for any length of time. Which has already happened - in Jerusalem, Galilee, London... And it is not a problem for her to constantly move between Strasbourg, where she has a home, and Wroclaw, where she has a studio. I think that in this itinerant lifestyle she leads, the slowness, even a certain meditative nature of the sculptural process she has chosen, provides - through the need to stop - a point of support. Even if she considers movement as a support. And she inscribes this paradox, transfers it in an incomprehensible way to her sculptures - because although they are motionless, many of them are about movement precisely, on the threshold of which they have been stopped, as if enchanted, and thus made unreal. And so they stand: female figures in ornamental bronze skirts, with a glass torso, luminous and expressively colored. Motionless and mute, as it were, hidden in themselves and their carefully contrived disguise - she says she likes the costume because it allows her to touch time. And she emphasizes that time is an important medium for her - the one that lasts, that happens. It is like a road, leading towards what is to come, but also like a record of the present passing into the past - the mood, emotions, inspirations, thoughts accompanying the creative process ... For us, viewers, it is sometimes impossible to read, so we have to spin our own stories, based on the impressions provided by the already finished object. For example, the reflection on bilingualism I have already mentioned. Perhaps understood as a duality - of body and spirit - of constancy and transience, of power and fragility? Perhaps of what is visible and what is invisible? And what color speaks of.
Blue, for example. It seems to be important to her, because it appears often, both in her paintings and in her sculptures. As in this glassy female half figure with a bird on her head, with the matter spread between her shoulders. She is like a phantom, like an azure cascade. Or the other one, made of bronze, equally enigmatic, also with a bird in her hair, also exuding blue - on a flared skirt. Yes, blue appears often - perhaps in the obvious reference of glass to water, perhaps to the firmament. For Eve Rossano claims that it is the sky, not the earth, that seems unchanging to her, and she, although she sometimes feels suspended between the earth and the sky, it is in the sky that she finds a sense of constancy. Is this why her sculptures often mess with their heads and look into the distance above? The most symptomatic in this context seems to me to be the open-air Angelus Silesius, set up in the Ossoline Baroque garden in Wroclaw. This almost three-meter bronze figure is shown very conventionally, which can be read as a symbolic shadow, a trace of the poet. And so it is raised on its toes as if it wanted to fly up. This impression is reinforced by two wings - one growing from the shoulder, the other from the heart - polished in gold - more metaphorical, speaking of spirituality and poetry. And then there's the head, polished realistically, portrait-like, but inspired and gazing at the heavens.
Although sculpture is the main thrust of her work, she has not abandoned painting and even tries to combine it with spatial objects. Her paintings are expressive with the expression of matter and the expansion of color, and through a busy, whimsical line inscribing the outline of a figure or face, and sometimes some inscription. He layers paint, introduces straw as a base matter, seeks an exit into space, accentuates and accepts chance and disorder. Unlike stylized sculptural objects, the paintings don't care about elegance, they even seem sometimes unfinished, not very detailed, abandoned in the middle of a brushstroke - and this accounts for their charm. They are like spontaneous registrations of some element happening before our eyes. It even seems to me that if I touched them, I would feel the warmth and truth of the body.
Let a certain photo be the point: it's a sunny day, the artist is standing next to the easel on which she is presenting a painting, and her left hand is resting on the pedestal, where there is an undersized sculpture - two figures, joined together: From a dark blue glass shaft, placed on a bronze base, emerges a double bust, also made of bronze, and heads facing each other - a female and a male. I have the impression that this figure emerged from a painting, an element of intermingling patches of blue, of different shape, strength and hue, topped by a band of horizontal yellow. Perhaps from that spot
in the upper corner, where, almost at the edge of the azure, a small white boat sails under a dark, calm sail.
Not only this luminous image, but also the two-headed figure, and the whole picture is suffused with sunshine and optimism - warm feelings. This is how I perceive Eve Rossano's art - as being created with tender patience,
for and from the joy of creation.
ZOFIA GEBHARD
