Its surreal component, rooted in the tradition of the South of Italy where the legend is still true, brings it to paint characters and places that seem enchanting, coming out of the pages of a Verga no more realist but of an Homer type in the matter of a fairy-tale. Images of faceless, unidentified women, locked in the black drape contrasting with dazzling skies, of violent and cruel nature.
Carla Morbiducci, 1975
I know some of the teachers from the Art College of Chieti where Rita Ippaso Liparoti declares that she has gained her art education: I recognize cuts, layouts and markings; I would say the phrasing, the same pictorial language spoken in that region of the contemporary Abruzzo, where I have many dearest friends. Yet I see the Sicilian origin dressing with acrylic spices all the Artist’s paintings.
It is true that at times this origin is unequivocal in the themes that align theories of black-stained women in the presence of the figs of India with their typical plots, but the authenticity of a nature, of a typical character, which meets and qualifies precisely where the lexical words “Chietini” become more dry, they become more acute: a sign that documents and attests not only that authenticity of which has been said, but an interior of vision already able to act on style and determine some basic characters. The characters that are thye worth of the Artist.
Domenico Purificato, 1976
… a particularly important work, a fresh composition of refined chromaticism of a Chagallian memory.
Raffaele de Grada, 1982
Her poetic world vaguely resembles the fantastic, and the figurative dictation merges with informal painting styles. The color looks like an antique fresco: the colors are dry and firm, with traces, crosses, overlays that emerge and disappear simultaneously. More ideal than real, more traces than defined definitions, with characters hovered in an undefined air vapor.
Aleardo Rubini, 1985
Reality and inner world find in the compositions of the Sicilian painter a conjunction in which mild and sad ghosts merge with the first floor in delicate transparent atmospheres. Next to the pictorial works, the artist presents a good number of sculptures in which the tension is accentuated by the dense symbol of meanings.
If at first she manages to blend with singular results dream and reality in reference also to a female condition on the one hand anchored to archaic rites and on the other suspended on unknown worlds, in her plastic work Rita Ippaso seems to rely on the suggestions that are also of the matter employed .
The simple and synthetic pattern conforms to the smooth color on the rough surfaces and parts that lighten the shapes with the clay’s own porosity.
They are emblematic figures in which the affair of a remote Sicily end up being fixed in a sort of timeless memory.
Who expects to turn round in the sound of an instrument with an obsessive rhythm, and when they stop they notice their timidity.
Luciano Spiazzi, 1985
… Her artworks, almost all of them large, are imposed by their formal refinement, their ariosity and the delicacy of the colors that engage in a subtle play of transparencies and velvets.
… The technique is that of “grattage”, that is, the clever removal of matter-color, led to leaving the soul as a clear sublime essence on the canvas.
… The curved surface, dense with limestone concretions, is enveloped in the rounded cocoon, the primary matrix of life.
The spirit of the earth is contained, caught a moment before molding the definitive expression of every single thing.
So these works can evoke everything, because of a whole being giving the impression.
Giuseppe Occhipinti, 1986
Rita Ippaso, a Sicilian painter with a beautiful interior world of poetic humanity.
To a superficial observer, the terms of her language only apparently could be approached in the Chagallian world, full of myths and legends, but, in fact, the paintings of Ippaso are of great and personal personality and candor. Her painting is the result of meditated conquest and suffering, a harmonious synthesis of so many elements. I prefer to speak of “harmonious synthesis” because finally this Sicilian artist has managed to overcome the “nightmare and the historical presence” of a social realism tied in various ways to an artist such as Guttuso. Some themes, linked to the feminine, are touched by the painter with a different and personal poetry.
Speaking to Rita Ippaso, I find an almost obsessive love for painting and an urgent need to translate the interior reality on the canvases. Also for this reason, his works retain a perceptible unusual spontaneity. Also on the solid platform of the technique, the painter has been able to “build” with conscience and freedom of expression.
It is a rare achievement, especially for those who only started with a natural disposition to “say” painting their reality as a joyous now sad tale.
Giovanni Repossi, 1985
Rita Ippaso exhibits paintings, sculptures, engravings. Everything is dream. From the anchoring, the ancient dimension of man and his being atemporal. Dream of the intus as a place of silence and light where it is possible to give value to the present.
In the plurality of languages the artist manifests a flamboyant self of life. The memorial painting of Chagallian elegance, which soon becomes able to interpret nightmare situations, as in “Children” of 1989, whose pastel color is crumble with violent black charcoal, violet red, giving the impression that the true Inspiration is Francois Bacon.
In the engraving is a naive romance: from the dark space of the plates appear lovers, similar to enchanted ectoplasmas. But the more conspicuous language of Rita Ippaso is the one of ceramics, reinventing in England’s striking dough, dampening the chromatic explosion known in Sicily.
In in the vases and in the zoomorphic figures strictly composing and sometime with geometric rhythms, such as “Taurus and Woman”, almost monotone is the light penetrating the porous matter, just moved by scratches of circles, drops of pink, light-blue and blue.
Pottery known of tuff and bushy stone, coming from archaeological digs for shapes that refer to Egyptians and Sumerians; Or emerged from the seabed with a fossil fish, oinochoe and face-masks. There is the taste of the find in this creation of ceramics that fascinates with Mediterranean passion and intelligence.
Giovanni Bonanno, 1993
Italo Calvino in his American lessons recommended the value of lightness. “My operation has been the most of a weight subtraction; I have tried to take the weight off the structure of the story and the language. ”
At these words I was thinking of the last works of Rita Ippaso. Paintings and, above all, engravings have lost the sense of closure and anguish that characterized her early works. The imprisoned animals, the women covered with bandages, obsessed blacks, have disappeared. Now everything is brightness in color and lightness in shape.
The subjects are also different: the figures are young brides on a bicycle, men looking at something, free birds in colored skies. There is a surreal image of the world, a fairy-tale interpretation of episodes, space, and life itself.
It is he thought of Marc Chagall, but also of Robert Delaunay, and especially of his wife, Sonia, for its chromatic richness, for the bright combinations of colorful geometric shapes that seem small, luminous rainbows.
However, it often happens that among bright yellow, intense reds, transparent blue, or in the middle of crisp compositions, there are some whirling black marks; Here, they engage in the work with irony, as in her last engraving, where they are called upon to build with the task of taking off the weight of the formal structure. Other times, on the other hand, seem to have been stumbled upon by the artist on the canvas with the intent of destroying, erasing images, and darkening the light, as is the case with many paintings.
This tangled sign marks the most fascinating aspect of Rita Ippaso’s work, a sign that is also found in ceramic sculptures, born of the great ability of the artist to synthesize the shapes, and the jewelery, the minimal and original sculptures that appear to come from the explosion of precious materials.
Lea Mattarella, 1995
Reasoning on her works, especially on the more recent paintings, it is noticed that the chromatic system is closely related to an inner emotion, producing deformation of the gesture with decisive strokes, and when resolved in large spaces, and when the semantic invention alters the usual conformation of the object in question. The motives of her transgression, which somehow anticipate certain trans-avant-garde solutions, are sufficiently clear because they do not depend on the will of contradiction in aesthetic terms but on the need to express different meanings in the creative affair.
An important part of her artistic situation is her English experience, which alternates during her twenty years of dedication to painting and at the same time to the plastic expression solved with the manipulation of ceramics. It follows a lyrical attitude with dramatic accentuation as a result of definitive events marking her life. In order not to be too schematic in the aesthetic (existential) position of Rita Ippaso, we must take into account the events, critical moments that can influence the outcome of the inventions. And it is the cost of sacrifices to impose the consciousness of the “lived”, moments in which one may weaken the will to try different models from the driving ones even when the aesthetic exposure has different characteristics and is not directly conducive to the dominant archetypes.
Of course, Rita Ippaso is concerned with the individual act of painting, the concrete moment of building a painting, of a particular painting. All this is placed with great care in its creative system, where the color expansion of the painting extends to the plastic dimension to give more body shape. The perceptive and burning process used to make painting creeps into matter – the ground that swells and invents grace to become form and to become matrix – and seizes the intimacy of things just when reality is to escape the Taking on the wave language of a dream, a memory dispersed along the Cabala’s trap “to try to recover the long-spun powers” (Foucault).
Franca Calzavacca, 1995
Rita Ippaso has managed to preserve the echo of that classical culture introjected during the years of education in Sicily and at the same time not stay alien to the really singular itineraries on the linguistic level of the earlier avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde.
It was said of the various sectors in which the artist’s work was concentrated, namely painting, sculpture and etchings. In the pictorial field, it is undoubtedly more relevant to her modernity, meanwhile for having repeatedly expressed her sympathy for informal poetics, where deterministic is the matericism, the gesture and the reset, sometimes even the iconic memorial. Even more remarkably impressive in her paintings is the robustness of the brushstroke and the color that is always very robust, as well as a lucid view of the space in which to place the various chromatic tiles in the juxtaposition of harmony. And then there is the great game of chords, and relationships and rhythm; All the coordination that finds its explanation when its miraculous etchings are studied, which in my opinion are one of the absolute vertices of her artistic production. I have always argued that the good artist must be excellent in design. Well, our author in his chalking work shows a surprising expertise in this regard. The sign is secure, calligraphic, formative of the image spontaneously. But the value that makes us most appreciate this gill of her artistic production is the absence of any though minimal decorative form and therefore of sentimental satisfaction on the itineraries and the signposts. There is sobriety summation, synthesis and executive will to land the image without baroque attitudes.
To close the perimeter of our artist’s artistic interests, we have her plastic production for which she uses a ceramic technique. It is undoubtedly the one that has given her greater professional fame and satisfaction, and then she has found the most suitable way to outline that interdependence between classical education, I was about to say even archaicist and a propensity to contemporaries.
Meanwhile, it is to be noted that Rita Ippaso has married a well-established thesis in recurring culture about the artistic value of her ceramic production. This, after the experiences of historical masters such as Fontana, Leoncillo, Agenore Fabbri, not to mention the same Picasso, no one is considered as a minor art, since any prejudice has fallen into that. Thus, the technique and the materials used to produce a work do not increase or impair the aesthetic value and content. Accordingly, it must be noted in these suggestive works that the enviable technical expertise consisted in knowing how to prevent the effects of the case due to the baking process of the work. But beyond the excitement of execution, it is the idea that you are about to be completely spontaneous, so there is a perception of full correspondence between the logos and the result. Mental project and its realization. In fact, sculpture is the trace of the artist’s inner identity. Therefore, the formal harmony, the balance of the masses, the elegance of the image, and the dynamism of the subject depicted are the harmony, balance, elegance and dynamism of his inner world made the chapter of an exalting tale that the author gives to her readers.
That you are clearly seduced by the magnificence of the archaeological traces of Magna Grecia, it is demonstrated by the fact that any work, although of a domestic dimension, potentially lends itself to being executed in monumental proportions. And then the reference to an archaic and then pre-encyclical civilization is determined by the anti-scratch logic of the surfaces where the perceptual kineticism is made by a pittenistic tingling that gives them tactile aberration and scabrosity. It means that every sculpture seems to have come back to light after millennia of oblivion and dictatorship of corrosion: a particular and unusual charm is given precisely by the absence of the fluidity of a polished and polycarbonate ceramic. None of this in her; On the contrary, a matter of profound physicality as it would have liked some of the protagonists of informal sculpture (I think here of the corrosive, archaic and at the same time precious value of the Marchigian Edgardo Mannucci).
A further talk about certain sculptures devoted to the theme of horse and other animals is that of the interaction between work-space. It is felt that the effort is to overthrow the traditional relationship, so it is no longer a work placed in space but a work that generates and creates space (which is why I was talking about monumental design). The plastic qualities of each work solidify almost that size, which is decisive in the sculptural field. Ultimately, as mentioned in the title of this testimony, Rita Ippaso has been able to remain in his research that has been going on for several decades with great public and critical acclaim, classicity with modernity, striving firmly against sterile forms of conceptual avant-gardism that Too often they run into prestigious shows. The work of art will also be able to exert its charm on the contemporary technological man and will be like in the past the nourishment of the spirit just provided that the aesthetic and formal values to which the humanistic training of our artist leads to constant reference .
Leo Strozzieri, 2007
… Life as a journey, now enjoyable, now full of pain, of which the scars are more or less healed. This is the theme of the pictorial engraving and ceramic work of Rita Ippaso, a native of Trapani who has divided her life between England and Abruzzo where she lives. The lppaso is a long story, dominated by the frankness, the sweetness and the luminosity, the one who has experienced sad experiences, and has learned to distract it, but never forget it. Precisely this seems to be the sense of her pottery with countless signs left by the punch, like “the great Pandora pot,” full of polychrome desires, enclosed in a casing that sums up faces and images of past experiences. ” The work of Rita Ippaso follows the realistic pattern, always mediated by the role of the dream, which transfigures reality. The tendency of the work is popular, with no archaic elements in Sicily, but also with contemporary contemplative mythologies, which, however, have lost the sense of the epic to dwell on the little things of everyday life. Small joys, not great happiness, like those of two “boyfriends on a bicycle”, reminding remotely some of Viviani’s pictures. All the works exhibited are the last fifteen years of Ippaso’s activity, when the sense of hope has grown to be felt and the colors become bright, to express again the sense of a quiet wait.
Marco Fragonara, 2005
Sicilian-born artist Rita Ippaso, now living and working in Loughborough in England, is exhibiting three dozen oil paintings at Vaughan College. St. Nicholas Circle. Leicester. Much of the charm in her work is the poised mystery of the symbolism. Three pictures, peopled with rather doll-like men and women, clothed and unclothed, portray a bride waiting naked at the altar followed by matrons uniformly clothed in their Sunday-best, a man fully clothed embracing a pale fleshed naked maiden and a nude woman Riding a blindfold mule while she carries aloft to pink umbrella. Fascinating
If there is such a thing as Eden-like sexual innocence, some of these paintings get close to expressing it. A healthy flow of personal style runs through this fascinating selection of figurative pictures. I particularly liked those where the focus is slightly blurred. Rita Ippaso art could be aptly called a gentle and poetic cultivated primitivism.
Ronald Moore, 1980
Known for a ceramic activity which begun in the 70s between Italy and England, where she has long lived, and has brought her to exhibit throughout Europe with great public and critical success, Rita Ippaso proposes a taste of that research a painter who has always traveled in parallel with sculpture. Her training has, in fact, expanded through the free attendances of the Chieti Institute of Art, the Ceramic Courses at valid English universities and the start of the engraving techniques at the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo, once she returned to her Sicily .
The first element of difference between the two paths, pictorial and plastic, is the abundance of color that impregnates the canvases and sometimes is removed for the benefit of the subject, always in bright shades and happy shades, allowing you to completely forget the purity of statuettes in dirty white ceramic. It is as if those rough surfaces, which in the sculpture give the sense of the sketched idea of raw material, from which the figures can spontaneously arise, almost art is an implacable urgency, now filled with chromatic pastes, always leaving some materiality at work. While in the sculpture the spectator’s hand could slip on the imperfect silhouettes, why never polish, now he or she can feel the corpusity of painting, retrace the artist’s path and recognize the same vibrant essence.
What is naturally reported from one technique to another is certainly the narrative node, which allows us to find a varied bestiary, the absolute protagonist of an interesting story that inevitably intertwines with the author’s life itself. Rita Ippaso reconstructs her traveling memories thanks to the hypnotic look of a tiger, the lightness of ostrich bodies, and the freshness of the seabeds. You are interested in capturing the epidermal sensations that nature can arouse with its complex beauty and can take on an art form, if you are guided with sincere spirit to become, from precious memories, eternal simulacra. With a great joy transmitted through vigorous brushstrokes, the choice of bright timbres, the simplified lines as childish designs, the artist brings all the magnificence enjoyed with his own eyes and gently introduces the theme of the journey. A good look at the set of works chosen is the story that is intricate and the animal world is a pretext to follow a path of life. The variety of fragmented scenes corresponds to a variety of human and professional experiences, which can only be guessed just by reading some biographical notes. Rita Ippaso wishes to think of all the adventures she has experienced, first of all not to lose them and then even to convey memory to those who admire her art.
There is an object that had already made a beautiful show of its own in the acoustic and aquatine, the bicycle, which now runs through exalted landscapes, never leaves the traveler’s journey and like him it passes from one bank to the other side of the river of life. On that bike suddenly a red-haired bride appears: she has the wind on her black dress and the sky in the wheels. It is clear that Rita Ippaso is still on the road and will stay there forever.
Chiara Strozzieri, 2012