paesaggi urbani: ORIZZONTI

a sequence

captured from a boat sailing on the canal

two gazes

one against the light and the other illuminated

Although not a regular visitor to the Venice Lagoon, Laura Federici was able to accurately capture the true essence of the lagoon space: the extreme variety in its apparent emptiness. The territory of the Lagoon, genuine lebensraum of the Serenissima, has always hosted a very strong contrast of purposes and functions, apparently incompatible with each other.

From the beauty of its marble city to the unstable self-built fishing huts of Pellestrina, at first sight so frail and friable, from the crops of Sant'Erasmo to the mussel and crustacean farms, from the kilns of the glassmakers who have been churning out fragile masterpieces for centuries, heavy metalworking and chemical industry located in Marghera, from the delicate wooden boats with a flat bottom to the steel giants built at the foot of the Ponte della Libertà, the lagoon space has always been able to hold everything together, often even against common sense.

The journey, or rather, the exploration that Federici offers us through her paintings is a critical and synthetic reinterpretation of this world in which anything can happen, held together by the common denominator of water and infinite and changing light, which has as its only orography the artificial figures of human labor and the distant background of the mountains, making the Latin motto contraria sunt complementa effective and visible.

Aldo Aymonino

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