Elena Angelini: Playing Sacred
Through both painting and drawing, Elena Angelini captures the fleeting purity of adolescence, delicately blurring the boundaries between innocence and experience, reality and imagination. Employing a meticulous technique that combines thin layers of diluted oil paint with confident pencil lines, Angelini imbues her work with an ethereal quality that places her figures in a liminal space of magical realism. This body of work is a poignant exploration of the moral ambiguity of childish games and innocence lost in the process of growing up. Angelini seems to be asking “Where does play begin and where does it end?”
Rooted in traditional painting methods, the artist’s process highlights certain qualities of the human form. Through translucent glazes of oil paint, she accentuates details of the body that are not always immediately evident, such as the folds of skin on the sole of one’s foot or the fragile bones that encase the heart.
In Nonexistent Knight, these hallmarks of Angelini’s process are evident. A bold red pencil line outlines the figure – the first and most immediate conduit for the artist’s vision onto the canvas - within which Angelini’s subtle, chromatic painted marks interplay to create a corporeal depth of protruding bone and sinewy muscle. While the composition might allude to heroic history paintings such as Edmund Leighton’s The Accolade or Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii, Angelini’s painting is far from an acknowledgment of courage or a call to action; rather the figure’s posture and relationship to both the sword and helmet points not to strength, but to his innocence and vulnerability. Childish play becomes blurred with rite of passage. Sitting in an anonymous soft wash of colour that bleeds into the canvas, it is clear that this figure is in the slippery no-mans-land of adolescence, caught somewhere between childhood and adulthood.
As in this painting, figures of personal significance – family and friends – are often depicted nude, positioned amidst military, athletic or circus paraphernalia. This deliberate fusion of references, ranging from Renaissance paintings to the iconic costumes designed by Farani for Italian neo-realist films of the mid-20th century, creates an oneiric quality, rendering the figures in no particular time nor place and yet positioned on the precipice of change. A grounding feature, however, is the presence of a number painted in the top corner of many of her canvases. While her figures seem to drift into a different world, these numbers anchor them in a recognisable reality – one that is controlled by order and linearity. They serve as markers for time or sequence, as in film, and sometimes reveal a mysterious connection between the sitter and the number only known to the artist.
Drawing inspiration from Emil Cioran’s reflections in A Brief History of Decay, Angelini seeks to explore an innate purity each person is born with. "Each one of us is born with a share of purity predestined to be corrupted," writes Cioran. Through the staging of figures alongside props of both play and war, Angelini examines the point where actions, unmarred by the complexities of adult consciousness, retain a purity derived from innocence. Through her evocative paintings and drawings, Elena Angelini invites viewers to reconsider the sanctity of play at that precise point when it is in danger of becoming quashed by moral consciousness.
