February 2005 "Gallery and Studio"

Pia Di Stefano Paints Her Inner Inferno

Pia Di Stefano, who has her studio in Florence, Italy, and will be included this year in the prestigious Biennale of Florence, is a painter with a compelling view of the human condition, in which images of sensu¬ality and mortality invariably intermingle. These are not the paintings of a happy go lucky soul, yet they are deeply moving and profoundly engaging in strange and unex¬pected ways.
The centerpiece of Di Stefano's recent exhibition at Montserrat Gallery, 584 Broadway, was an epic unstretched canvas, ten feet high by twelve feet wide, nailed to the wall as though crucified - an appropriate presentation, since it was called "Purgatory." Di Stefano brought this classic theme of Dante and Virgil alive anew in her boldly conceived oil which, despite its heroic scale and formal complexity, was made all the more immediate by the painter's improvisa¬tional approach.
"The paint hypnotizes me as it reveals something that could not be expressed in words," Di Stefano has stated. "Forms slow1y reveal themselves as already having been there. Like a dance with inner conversation, painting for me is the language of feelings and self awareness."
Traces of process are everywhere visible in Di Stefano's paintings, invigorating her accomplished realist technique with areas that appear unfinished, drips, and other spontaneous elements. These seemingly unresolved notes add an unusual, almost brutal, energy to her symphonic composi¬tions, enhancing their brash authenticity.
Like the late Paul Georges, another intrepid figuratist, Di Stefano appears to invite chaos into the canvas, yet somehow makes all of the diverse elements in the composition magically cohere. In "Purgatory," some figures are classically proportioned while others are wrenched wildly out of scale, so that a hand looms mon¬strously, clutching at the body of a ripe female nude entangled with other naked figures (one wearing a death's head for a face) in a mass of bodies writhing above heaping tongues of flame. Yet somehow, nothing appears out of place; for the distortions depict emotional and psychological states, as opposed to merely physical cir¬cumstances or conditions.
As with Bosch, we know that Di Stefano is portraying an inner inferno, a realm of visions and nightmares that take on verisimilitude in direct propor¬tion to how far she is willing to go in revealing them. And she is willing to go very far indeed, in this and other paintings such as "Torn," where a nude self-¬portrait with pensive, downcast eyes is included with other unclothed figures in a less fiery but, in its own way, equally purgatorial scenario.
Nakedness in Di Stefano's paintings is invariably a state of the soul as much as of the body. She strips her figures bare, revealing their inner demons, even as she employs succulent oil paint as a surro¬gate for sensuous flesh. In another large canvas called "Abyss," a pair of seemingly disembodied hands reach out from darkness to rest on the shoulders of a voluptuous female nude. Are they the hands of a lover, partially obscured in shadow, or of malign spirit reaching out for her from the Other Side? That we cannot know for sure and that the artist herself may share our uncer¬tainty makes the paintings of Pia Di Stefano all the more powerful.

-Maureen Flynn

LA GAZZETTA DI PARMA FRIDAY 5TH AUGUST 2005
CULTURE AND SOCIETY

Paintings by Pia Di Stefano
COLOURS OF LOVE IN FONTANELLATO

Rocca di Fontanellato opens up its doors, or perhaps it is best to say it lowers the drawbridge, to welcome starting from tomorrow and right through to 13th August, the display of paintings by the American painter, of Italian origin, Pia Di Stefano. If the works of Pia Di Stefano are put on show to the public in the wonderful context of the ancient manor house it is all thanks to the curiosity of the Italian-American collector Doris Torrens de Paolini, to the sensitivity of the mayor and of the town hall of Fontanellato and to the constant help provided by the cultured guardian of the Rocca, Mario Chiapponi.
Extremely huge paintings: that tell stories of love, hate, hopes and betrayals.
The painter explains that… “painting hypnotizes her and allows her to discover something that cannot be transmitted simply by words, while the forms that will subsequently take on dignity seem as though they have always been a part of her real life”.
Indeed it is difficult not to stop and take a close look, sometimes with fear at those faces full of expressions and decisive admission of a fear to live, but also of a desire to smile at fate.
Pia Di Stefano’s paintings are DI GRANDE RESPIRO, but they all portray objects and people with such accuracy that it is as if the world as she paints it is the result of admiration filtered by the lens of a microscope. In terms of colour her paintings have a very interesting peculiarity: generally the painter uses a coloured pigment and white, so much so that in her paintings normally just two colours can be identified, black and white. Pia Di Stefano is young, courageous and full of talent. She was born in the United States and her works have been exhibited in California, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Denmark, Copenhagen, Barcelona and Florence. She paints in her studio in Florence.


REVIEWS 3
LA GAZZETTA DI PARMA
Monday 15th August 2005

ON THE 21ST IN ROCCA THE PERSONAL EXHIBITION OF PIA DI STEFANO

New York – Florence with a stopover in Fontanellato

FONTANELLATO – The body as a capsule that surrounds the soul. Kokoschka, Klimt, Ensor, Munch, Van Gogh, the colours of some murales, Picasso cubist: these are just some references that spring to mind when admiring the paintings of the New York artist Pia Di Stefano a young talent in the contemporary artistic world, who before exhibiting at the Biennale of Florence will stop, right though to 21st August, in Rocca Sanvitale with a huge exhibition called Intra-Spectrum. The exhibition is open every day from 09:30 to 12:30 and from 15:00 to 19:00. Free admission.
Pia is young. Her paintings are huge dimensions of colour, time, of enlarged life. The innate talent leads her to relate with important maestros of the twentieth century, but not only. Almost thirty paintings can be seen in the castle of Parma. All of them portray interest for the human body crossed by time and by an inner awareness. Large hands, long fingers, limbs contorted just like branches, almost hooked, or joined together like prayers. Hands joined together like prayers that sometimes scream, others are spiritually collected in total silence.
“Painting hypnotizes me as if I were able to reveal something that could not be expressed through words”, Pia Di Stefano, who currently lives in Florence, points out.


REVIEWS 4
L'Informazione di Parma – 11th August 2005

PAINTINGS IN THE CASTLE
Arms and legs are intertwined in spirals of colour in Di Stefano’s works. Oblique glances that are painfully aware.
THE EXHIBITION “Intra-Spectrum” held in Rocca di Fontanellato until 21st August.
Pia, the artist hypnotized by paintings. The New Yorker that lives in Florence is young and full of talent.
She states: “In Nepal I saw the beauty of human beings”.
Arms that grasp together and intertwine. Hands with long fingers that hold, squeeze and open up in a silent prayer. Legs close together or once again intertwine with others, in spirals of colours. The others never have an appendix role, a complementary accessory. These are the elements that attracts and focus attention of those who observe the works by Pia Di Stefano, whose paintings are now on display at Fontanellato, in the exhibition area of Rocca Sanvitale. The exhibition also includes the painting that will be displayed this year at the Florence Biennale.
She is still very young, this is how Pia describes herself, but she is full of talent. A talent that unfolds by attempting different possibilities, measuring herself in tests of style that cross the entire artistic scenario of the century that has just ended, in the search for a personal expressive dimension. If some paintings remind us of an expert of colour (an example for everybody is Van Gogh in the oil painting ‘Moonlit night’) the emotional plot is completely original. Di Stefano, a New Yorker that has moved to Florence, describes her profession in this way: “I am hypnotized by painting as it reveals something that cannot be expressed through words. Forms slowly come to life as if they were there previously. Just like a dance with an intimate dialogue, painting is a language of feelings and of self-awareness”.
One of the most important turning points in her life was her experience as a voluntary worker in Nepal in a clinic for the poor. It was then that she realised what the objective of life really was. The artist goes on to say “In a place like Nepal, once you get rid of the boredom and the confusion of our complicated lives, you finally have the chance to see the beauty of human beings, of nature and of feelings”.
From her experience in Nepal Pia also acquired a sense of fragility towards the human body. “I believe that the body is a metaphor for the soul, a vehicle through which the soul experiences feelings and sentiments. The body is a capsule, an instrument used to interact in the world”. Therefore this is where the limbs as ganglions and coiling and intertwining bodies come from. And, most of all, the glances: provocative and aware and peaceful in a strange kind of way. The exhibition called Intra-Spectrum is at Rocca San Vitale in Fontanellato up until 21st August with free admission, everyday from 09:30 to 12:30 and from 15:00 to 19:00.

Gaia Lauria
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