THE IMMEDIACY OF MATTER

In her art, always told with awareness and through unceasing painting activity, artist Liliana Scocco Cilla adopts a very original and evocative style. She paints directly onto the canvas, with her own hands, without using a paintbrush or any other means, to reveal a form of art which is totally innovative and particularly pleasant. Her painting is thus unmistakeable, born from a great passion and a real talent, blended with a series of emotional elements, to create a unique expressive result, pervaded with communicative force and accomplished formal rendition. It develops into a construction of remarkable visual impact and refined conceptual balance, which greatly involves and continuously amazes the observer. The deep need to feel the matter in her hands ant the necessity to process it become for the artist a dialectical exchange loaded with communicative power and seducing beauty, allowing that very matter to immediately take on a unique language, full of body and vitality. The works titled “Paesaggio fantastico” (Fantastic landscape), “Verso il sole” (Towards the sun) and “Libertà” (Freedom) go beyond the skilled representation of chromatic structure: indeed, they offer the observer a deeper insight, able to reveal attractive vibrations and absolute emotions. With the oil on canvas technique, Liliana Scocco Cilla unveils an accomplished application of colour and a decided formal appearance, underlining a manifest and unbridled designing ability. The harmonious combination of colours, always layered with care and diligence, points to a chromatic identity of strong artistic tendency, in which the preparation of defining light-and-shade effects and the essence of the mark overflow with throbbing vitality.

The natural theme, which indeed plays the leading role, is viewed by the artist through an extremely personal avant-garde interpretation, constantly filled with contents and expressive synthesis.

Swinging between past and present, between poetry and contemporaneity, the artist masterfully combines graphic expressionism with a creative dynamism which is undoubtedly versatile and concrete.

M. Malì

From Monet towards gestural painting

To set the beginning of modern sensitivity we need to go back to English romantic painters as Constable and Turner, who originated an outstanding feature of impressionist painting.

Monet’s work Impression: Sunrise, which became the manifesto of Impressionism, shows a small boat in the distance with two people who, according to English romantic painting, are looking at the sun. The painter is interested primarily in the landscape he is looking at, he paints with exceptional rapidity, almost steeling the light of the sun.

Spot painting, quick, with touches of colour and effect of the study applied to the finished work is a feature of Monet’s work, and of the work of Titian before him, who painted without a preliminary study. Thus the effect of something that has non been finished, hence the concept of impression, which is not a conclusive, deep interpretation.

Like the great masters of Impressionism, Liliana Scocco Cilla is capable of creating the same lyrical, romantic images, rich in chromatic force, using her bare hands refusing the traditional tools of a painter, brushes and palette knives.

Suffice in to think that Monet himself, during his splendid retreat in Giverny, wrote: “I’m trying to do something I’ve never done before, a frisson my work has not yet provided”… (we are looking at his work Water-lily pond, 1899).

The study of shapes and colours changing as the day goes by, the reflection of the water and flowers are the result of a long research on the part of the artist, the quest for the innermost emotional vibration and the minute pigments that could expose the retina of the observer.

Likewise, Liliana Scocco performs a deep inner research that is translated into a harmonious game on the canvas that absorbs in its silent emptiness the great psychological force of the artist.

But, unlike the great impressionist artists, Liliana’ s painting becomes more gestural because it lacks the instrumental phase where the painter takes the paintbrush or the spatula and moves from the palette to the canvas.

This is painting from the heart, straight off, with a direct impact on the matter that reaches the white canvas without alterations.

The impressions (or feelings, as Cezanne called them) take shape and turn into a dreamlike landscape, the rising sun, the sunset and the unfurled sails of a regatta.

There is no human presence in these small boats, what matters is the study of how nature, water and wind move. The palette belongs to the solar sphere, originates from the light, there are no dark shadows, only pure colours. Liliana Scocco Cilla’s quest will never end; this immediate, spontaneous approach to reality will make her go on painting in a obsessive, unique way.

The strength of her work originates from the intensity of her feelings, her joy and her grief, therefore Liliana Scocco’s work represents the artist herself and her colours express her thoughts.

Isabella Convertino

LILIANA SCOCCO CILLA’ S TALISMAN

In the inheritance of the southern wind, Paul Gauguin’s fairy talisman has directly passed from the inexperienced hands of French Nabis to the inspired hands of Liliana Scocco Cilla, eliminating spatula hits and pencil touches, adorned and geometric sketches, perspective and ornamental canons.

With the simple overlap of colours, the immediate supply of intuition and the pictorial instinct of fancy, she gets extraordinary perspective, depth and movement effects, in the layers of diaphanous light, in the drops of dewy water, in the flames of lighted fire.

In her stupendous, chromatic mix, there ring the red ruby of sunsets on coasts, the green emerald of the lawns in flowers, the yellow topaz of the harbors in Ravenna, with a naturalistic seize, a spontaneous spirit, a dynamic hold, in an interior relief and in a chiaroscuro sui generis.

Liliana Scocco Cilla departs from the effective reality of paradisiacal angles, in order to abstract their secret sense, their impalpable spirit, their hidden treasure and to transfer it on her candid canvases, passing from the intimate casket of her subconscious and dissolving it in sweet visions of an ecstatic dream.

Chromatic therapy is an ideal catharsis, in order to purify her mind: shaken, touched and tormented by daily routine, general discomfort and global pollution.

They provoke her rebellion to injustices, her ransom from evil and her victory of final good.

The four seasons alternate themselves in her admirable pictures, without any evil’s flowers, death’s leaves, crooked trees: eradicated by the fury of elements, the carelessness of men and the anger of gods, who distribute light to pigments, grace to colours and poetry to her oneiric signs, from the top of Olympus.

Gianni Latronico

FLUIDS

Like fluids that in the hands of Liliana Scocco Cilla seduce and bewitch the colours, transfigure into marks, tones and traits, recreate backdrops of the existing and scenarios of the unexplored, capture ectoplasms, guide perceptions and automatisms, embroider visions and ceremonials: because (in the word of Novalis) “to make experimentations it takes natural genius, that is the thaumaturgical ability to grasp the meaning of Nature and act according to its spirit”, an extraordinary charisma of which Liliana Scocco is and has always been a repository and a bestower ; and finally because (says Novalis once again) “Nature is a petrified magical city”, a city of which Liliana Scocco Cilla clearly knows each and every corner and breath, of which indeed she holds the amazing and enchanted keys.

Nuccio Mula (Art Critic)

CHROMATIC SONG

The paintings by Liliana Scocco Cilla are permeated by a never-ending chromatic song that sweeps us along to the depths of violent reds, loud whites, vibrant yellows, all echoing from a distance.These colours seem to move. Blue emerges from dark depths to vivid clearness, never loosing its strong glints, with a few dusky tones. These colours lure us to a celebration of light that sweeps us away from the present, to an ideal world, where we might find back the vigour of our youth. And then the glory of sunset, their magnificence and strength, their ardour that is almost sensual. They evoke contemplative moments, solitude and silence. And then, unexpected, a feeling of nostalgia overwhelms us.

The original chromatic sensitivity of the artist deserves all our attention. She is capable of creating perfectly readable landscapes by using only her palette, without the support of sketches.

Her use of colour also deserves to be further highlighted. Vibrant, acute colours stretch unbounded, sometimes they seem to merge in the background, fade and come apart. The whole is kept together by the harmonic balance of the composition, which results from the artist’s innate talent as well as from her studies. If we should define the artistic trend of Scocco’s work, we could say her paintings belong to the figurative current. However, we would rather avoid confining her work to any current, for its innovative spirit is too strong, albeit respectful of traditions.

Landscapes and then more landscapes, this is Liliana Scocco’s work. We can look at the sea, its ebbing and flowing of braking in white foam. Looking towards the horizon, the surface of the sea turns green like the pasture lands on the mountains, as the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio would say. And where the sea meets the sky, the eyes lingers on a white streak. The sea is alive, it breathes and feels. Along these lines, there is a painting called “Bagliori sul mare” (Afterglow on the sea). It is pure music emanating from the palette of the artist. Every colour, be it dark or light, rises to the highest meanings. And you feel the longing to dive into the colours of that sky.

Franco Ruinetti (Art Critic)

PALETTE OF GEMS

Liliana Scocco Cilla gives a most personal interpretation of the painting art, where the mean of expression is the artist’s hand rather than the traditional paintbrush. Like a pianist moves his fingers on the keyboard to express his inner world through music, the artist uses hers to model the colour on the canvas, following her innermost thoughts and feelings.

Through her instinctive way of painting, so pure it is almost elemental, where emotion prevails on reason, Liliana Scocco Cilla creates a world overflowing with energy and freshness.

The palette of the artist includes every thinkable and unthinkable gamut of colours. All the colours present in the mind of the artist become real on the canvas, since for Liliana Scocco canvas and palette are one and the same thing, just like her hand and its great creative power is the same thing as a paintbrush.

The painter boldly combines colours, recreating on the canvas the different hues of her inner impressions as they are bred by her multicoloured feelings, characterised by strong, brilliant emotions.

In her works, the artist suggests her forms rather than outlining them, since the precision of details succumbs to the continuous flow from her lively, creative mind. The lack of contours of shapes and landscapes hints at the ever-changing nature of the world, which can be captured as an immobile entity only by a camera.

The reminders of impressionism emerge from works that seem to linger only for the time of a look, an emotion: rage gives way to quietness, storms to calm, dawn to sunset, in a never-ending journey through the labyrinth of the human soul.

Serena Bonan (Art Critic)

Luminosity and light

The first linear coordinates that make the painting by Liliana Scocco Cilla unique are to be found in its luminosity, the soft light of the different moments of day and season that this great artist blends and expresses throught her own will, improving the natural context with the evolution of shadows that stands for the figurative backgrounds of appearance and feelings.

In expressing her Art, the painter Liliana Scocco Cilla gives voice to all her innermost feelings, whose essence is the landscape itself, as proven by the technique chosen by the artist to paint with her fingers, devoting her style to consonant chromatic modulation.

With this systematic attention, the work created by Liliana Scocco Cilla projects the liveliness of colours in perfect harmony with the subject, which responds to all priority symbolic conditions adopted by Liliana Scocco Cilla, and proposes the realization of the image to the figurative style, the pictoresque imitation of reality, as a proof of what the artist finds most inspiring.

The chromatic fabric with which Liliana Scocco Cilla expresses the affinity to the pleasurable change of weather focuses on the realistic component, thus the object is rich in manifest and fulfilling illusory sensations, which belong to a line that consolidates and corroborates the process that gives visibility to the compact and nebulous landscape at the awakening of a precious dawn, apt at reawakening the warmth of the air at the magical contact with the beginning of a new day. Therefore, the landscape painted by Liliana Scocco cilla incorporates the essence of candid and bright visions with silent and colourful spaces, which, in the immediacy of the synthesis, evoke the abandon to a relaxing moment of solitude, which includes the symbolic appearance of the sun or the moon, in the ferment of the colour and the ornament, where beauty is comprised in lines and coveted “celestial” spots.

Therefore, the iconographic content of the Work by Liliana Scocco Cilla engraves on the memory the precious, and often long lost, naturalistic goal. The sails at the centre of the painting create the fulfilling feeling of a wish that will come true, the oncoming nigth on the red sunset, rich in important hues and vibrant poetic tremor, endows variety and elegance to the trait and nourish the memory of lasting and noble moments lived with magic.

Flavio De Gregorio

EMOTIONS

Nolde, one of the greatest landscapist of the 20th century, once said: “When painting, i would have liked that colours, through me as a painter, developed on then canvas quite in the same way as nature creates its figures…”. Something similar applies also to the work of Liliana Scocco, who indeed paints on an impulse, instinctively, modulating the colour spread with her hands directly onto the canvas.

A creative exercise, which links the forms of nature with the ability to feel or feel part of, a sort of empathy in which, representation is no longer mimetic but rather subjectivistic and creative.

In Liliana’s work – with its forms leaning towards impressionistic-inspired models at times while acquiring more gestural vibrancy at others – colours and light are the alphabet through which the artist unveils her rich interior world. Colours which are spread layer upon layer, loaded with vibrations, with a medley of tones, sometimes airy, sometimes intense, always imbued with light.

And it is precisely that light which stretches space beyond the horizon, beyond the visible, that gives us the key to understand the work of Liliana – a self- taught painter, drawn to art by that need to express one’s emotions which is at once a universal and personal need to communicate – and that with its ability to stir “emotions” eventually conveys the feeling of an interior harmonious fusion between man. Nature and the universe.

Franca Fossi (Teacher of Art History)

The instinctive and inner landscape of an artist

The artist tk but it is exactly what Liliana Scocco Cilla does in her works. She belonhinks, dreams and translates all her emotions on an empty canvas, the mirror of her immediate feelings, using only her hands. This might look as a difficult tasgs to the modern impressionist trend, with an extra feature, the direct use of her hands to create images that turn her feelings into paintings. Her work is marked by exceptional creative force and shows perfect harmony between the naturalistic poetic reality and the expression of the artist’s emotions. Liliana Scocco is the only painter in the world to use this unusual and complicated technique.

With her bare hands she emphasises the warmth, the light, the emotion and the quality of being an artist in a given moment.

She uses her hands as a paintbrushes and palette knives to paint with bright colours, shining with her inner joy in capturing the beauty of nature and the world.

In the painting Sails at Dawn the sails are as clear cut as sculptures moving on the water, with a base and a balance of weight.

Liliana Scocco Cilla is more than an artist; she is a living wonder in the history of contemporary painting. Her graphical description is extremely accurate: her hands draw the landscape with precision, like Monet or Renoir. Her landscapes are poetic, dominated by the dream of being taken to a new existential sphere.

Painting is a moment of escapism, a moment to let the world see the beauty of nature through the romanticism of the colours, originating from the soul.

We look at a limpid light, sunset, the warm colours of spring and summer. All this is the result of scientific research described with pure colours, the same colours used by the great painters of the past.

Liliana Scocco Cilla does not need to copy anything, since her source of inspiration are her innermost thoughts, her dreams, her emotions. She uses her joyful strength to translate it all into her work. Using her hands to work with the colours, she permeates her work with a sense of peace clearly perceived by the observer. For all her talent, the artist was awarded a golden medal at the exhibition organised at the Art Gallery Modigliani, where her work met with great success.

Romano Pelati Sculptor

TOWARDS AIRY HORIZONS

Liliana goes beyond the spatial boundaries of the canvas, beyond the use otherwise cold of a paintbrush, to develop a physical, tactile, highly sensual technique.

Indeed, the artist prefers to mix the colours with her own hands, to feel their texture, perhaps even perceive their coldness or, on the contrary, their warmth: in a nutshell, to establish with them a direct and spontaneous contact and let them lead her in the realisation of her works.

The result is of a remarkable artistic depth, original, never trite. Indeed, in her paintings, the artist tells us of her dreams of beauty and freedom, with her boats, sails unfurled in the wind.

Everything is a source of inspiration, through imagination and creativity, which the artist certainly does not lack.

Liliana Scocco leads us towards wide and airy horizons, full of light and warmth, compelling the observer to contemplate her works in genuine amazement.

Dott. Nadine Giove Art Critic

MODULATION OF LIGHT

Liliana Scocco Cilla portrays a bright and colourful world, irradiated by a range of undertones and nuances, composed through the breaking of tones and boundaries, a world that fluctuates over the reflections and modulations of light. It is a delicate and light ensemble, fragile even, despite the vivid brilliance of its colour mixtures, the exuberant explosion of its forms, the dazzling swirling of its depths.

It might be the complete absence of any kind of rigidity, the faintness of outlines, the uncertainty of all boundaries, but one invariably gets the feeling that all the canvas holds is an impression.

A touch and it will vanish.

Francesco Giulio Farachi

The encounter

Everybody has banal encounters and privileged encounters in their lives.

Liliana Scocco Cilla had special encounter and today she tells us about it with her exquisite serenity: her encounter with art.

The need to express ourselves streams out of the depths of our souls; ancient Greeks used to say that “painting is silent poetry and poetry is the voice of painting (Simonie).

Liliana chose to hide her voice for a long time out of her natural modesty, but today she has decided to express herself and to speak of her colours, her lines, the explosion of a song. Her words are spontaneous, direct. The story she tells with her colours comes directly from her fingers, without the mediation of paintbrushes and palette. Her hands mould and express her unique language.

Her marines sometimes look as big commas or big exclamation points.

Unknown seas that are alive in her soul, like sunsets that seem to say that the night will never fall and are therefore poems of the reflections.

In the first phase of her artistic work, Liliana showed her potential creativity, then, year after year, like a scuba diver emerging from the water with hands full of forbidden corals, she let her work find its unusual accents, those vibrant lines that come directly from her hands, without a pre-drawn sketch, are full of melancholy but, at the same time, they express a great strength.

Liliana imposed her work with delicacy and firmness, certain of the path she was following. Her paintings do not hide any pent up aggressiveness, they are rather the result of the unaware processing of a world that has already been experienced, in the artist’s incipient adolescence, in her homeland, Pola, in the Istria region that is now lost.

If water is a favourite theme of her artist’s, her painting “Sailing race on the lake”, with the boats with unfurled sails on non impetuous waters but rather aware of the richness of colours, is an image of life, which emerges from the artist’s subconscious in a brave kaleidoscope that finds reality in imagination.

Maintaining the balance between images, feelings and poetry is a rare gift. Specialised art critics will always find suggestions coming from the great European history of painting, this is their task, but Liliana’s work seems to escape any classification.

Looking at her paintings – with an attentive rather than unaware look – you sense this primitive originality emerging from each painting.

Those bright colours that do not fear dark hues or even black, do not intertwine in some sort of rebellion, because Liliana’ s hands and heart have already enshrined the richness of the encounter with art, which cannot be turned into a clash.

Day after day past sufferance has benne transformed into the delicate joy of expression, of being there with small amounts of happiness. Talking part in all this is an experience that cannot leave you cold.

The naked palette, a tempest of lights and colours, used with experienced hands, has found an artist that turned materiality in a deep quest of the spirit.

All is done with the artist’s hands, without any arrogance, without even noticing that she is unique.

Liliana Scocco Cilla’s never-ending search, so vital, let her find drops of infinity and she gives them to us as a gift.

Paul Valèry wrote that “the painter should not paint what he sees but rather what shall be seen”.

Maybe this is the reason why Liliana Scocco Cilla opens her creativity to tomorrow, with inflamed dawns waiting for the day she already has inside of her.

Franca d’Amico Sinatti

Beyond the boundaries of sensitive color

My first encounter with the work by Liliana Scocco Cilla left me with the child-like amazement that overcomes me every time I find myself in front of a superb display of aesthetic skills. Its immediate effect makes you abandon any cultural reference and all the traditional interpretation criteria that critics use to label every phenomenon. This work takes the observer to a new vusual experience bordering on the irrational, the emotional, in spite of its extraordinary concreteness.

The self-taught education of the artists, imposed by her simple and inevitable need to paint, shows how wrong it would be to try and force Liliana’s work into a defined artistic trend.

Obiously, the artist does have her own background, of which she is more or less aware. From the poetic point of view, it can be identified in the dramatic and swirling works by J.M. WilliamTurner, where some landscapes bulging with humidity and lashed by a dazzling light present a nature that is always capable of expressing human emotions. Or, more from the point of view of the pictorial output, the swift, genuine strokes of colour by Claude Monet, who however paints to decostruct and reconstruct a world which is mainly exterior, whereas Liliana Scocco Cilla prefers mental views.

While bearing in mind these cultural suggestion, we have to stress that the only inspiring principle, the only great Master undelying these representations, is life itself. Life seen as human adventure that leaves nothing behind, takes everything there is to be taken and uses it. Life as the multiform trace memory leaves in the human soul; life as joy, hope, vital impulse, or as pain, disappointment.

Liliana’s works cannot be read, there have to be felt.

Choosing to paint with her fingers, the artist expresses her need to feel the chromatic magma in order to subject it to her own expressivity. Her instinctive and expert fingers as the needle of a sesmograph, ready to register in real time the emotional jolts of the artist in the short moment when memories, love of life and creative drive meet.

Her marines, from the sunniest and most quiet to the darkest and deepest, are characterised by thealternation of portentous shades that barely hide the anguish of the artist for the ineluctability of human misery and sudden vivid colours and opening up of immense space that reveal the artist’s inborn confidence in the mystery generating the natural element, sanctuary of hope and hinner peace.

Probably one of the most interesting interpretation keys is to be found in the close relation between the artist and the divine. Liliana’s paintings are permeated by an invisible force that works from the outside and triggers a series of natural phenomena registered by the artist with amazement and gratitude. Therefore, we have to look beyond the sensitive element, the irresistible sensual side that this painting so matter-oriented and rich of dramatic impulse conveys at the very first glance, but rather wonder why those full arrays of sails are all bent towards the horizon beyond, and what drives them. Maybe it is this invisible element, the wind, the real protagonist of these landscapes.

The wind that sometimes blows peacefully, permeating everything with a stagnating atmosphere and sometimes surges in unheralded storms, or starts moving towards a destination that is apparently unreachable. This wind is the designated interpreter of the stong desire for transcendence that lives in the soul of the artist.

Diego Galizzi