"... and we say with greater prominence that 'nature' is stupid before art and that it is mute if mankind does not make it speak".

This is what my spellbinding poets are for: Luciana Matalon is an artist in whose doctrine the vestiges in the various dominions of art are disassembled. An artist of the intellect by dint of force and tradition and who has not 'squeezed' herself within the sphere of aesthetics but has outstretched herself into that of criticism and culture.

In an atmosphere of problematic findings, proposals and relaunchings, with her "travels in the memory" she seems to set ablaze retrieved architectures, rediscovered constructions of the soul and refound spiritualities.

By way of her "pillagings" of ancient roots and by means of her 'travelogues', Luciana Matalon brings "past lives" to the surface, giving body and matter to figures of anxiety engaged in rigid maturations.

In gathering the experiences of the memory she frees the dramatic absoluteness and the symbolic nature of the works into reality. History, myth and what is relevant to the present day... the problems broached by Picasso, representing ethical and linguistic openings, could not but find a moral and deferential representation of contemporary thought.

The Europeanism of Luciana Matalon has found its meditation in the intelligent reading of also Oriental cultures which even have their origins in the fall of the Roman Empire which opened itself towards the East. An opening that crosses the thresholds of golden and mirroring imagination!

The travel in the memory is carried out in a passionate night of myths in which the artist has found her taste for a form, a sensual and mystical intellectualism of her own intelligence.

In this way we read the stylistic characteristics, the totems and the presences of the living lived. An eternal return which holds back the space-time breath in the stratigraphic configuration of the symbolic testimony of being (as Varga has written). The fever of painting and sculpture, the divine state beyond sublimed harmony, create the encantador dream of an artist who is "aristocratic" both by way of language and expression.

The repeated gesture freed from style becomes essential writing, suggested within abstract zones.

Luciana Matalon's story is one of spellbinding poets, sensitive and actual, who with their lyricism cause the ghosts of the memory to quiver. Luciana Matalon: ruler of her own visual, courageous, severe and rigorous pentagram is suggestive, musical and stirring with her travels in the memory.

Jolanda Pietrobelli
Pisa, 5th of March 1991