The exhibition of this season on the part of the Civica Galleria d'Arte Moderna is dedicated to Luciana Matalon, a polyhedric artist, sculptor, creator of jewellery and of graphic works. I have immediately seen that it is the first time this Museum hosts a female protagonist. I am pleased that an inadmissible and casual partiality has in this way been repaired.
Matalon should be included within that restricted circle of visionary artists belonging to the last two decades, although it is better to say that she forms part thanks to the striking intuitions of her spirit, her dreaming nature, cultural loves and the art kindled by her ideal (and like) 'masters' such as Klee, Brauner, Calder and Fontana.

From as early as the 1960's she has belonged to the visionaries thanks to the series of works entitled Cattedrali dell'inconscio [Cathedrals of the Unconscious], so fantastic and unreal, contemporaneously belonging to the past and the future, stimulating unusual emotions, rich in memories, regrets, desires and aspirations.
A cycle of cathedrals and yearnings, of ascensional impetuses: cathedrals as the symbols of the human daring of every age - although contemporary for us - take on a particular meaning from that historical day when man set foot on the moon, transforming dreams into reality.
The works by Matalon, her paintings and sculptures, also belong to the current of Spatialism founded by Fontana.
A painter who is refined and sensitive, synthetic and essential, sober in her colours and with a tendency towards abstraction (even if not lacking in figurative references from amongst which we can cite her "eyes-watches" and the storks), she enjoys a formal and matteric - polymatteric - freedom that does not have preestablished limitations.
Her sculpture and jewellery are not only created from spatial and dynamic interests but also from visual poetry, and this together with a subtle and at times undeclared naturalism, the expression of a tormenting attachment to an Earth which is deteriorating beneath our very eyes and which is fully shown in the series of the forests and the "trees of knowledge" carried out with flat, almost bidimensional surfaces and vitalized by Hebrew characters which entirely cover them like ancient documents of love and history.
With the works of the 1980's Matalon 'transports' us on emotional journeys within the depths of the psyche where the exchanges of ages and cultures take place, where one discovers the actuality of ancient civilizations. The titles of the works are illuminating: Archeologie della psiche [Archaeologies of the Psyche], Scavi della memoria [Excavations of the Memory], Archeologie del pensiero [Archaeologies of Thought] and Archeologie abissali [Archaeologies of the Abysses].

In being faced by the small sculptures, the steles and the totems which Matalon has created, ideating them as the projects for both large and very large works, one feels the desire to immediately see them dilated in the certainty that they would really represent the distinctive sign of our civilization which notwithstanding the diversity of the scientific-technological power is so similar to that very ancient one of our ancestors.

The Director
Silvio Zanella