"Yet I can't say more about Laura Federici's work except that as a director I feel a great similarity between her work and what I do.
Perhaps because it often starts from a real fact. Or maybe because in her, looking over imagining prevails, which is the way of making cinema that I love the most.
It seems that it looks at the world, and bounces it back to the viewer with a density of its own, amplifying its carnality or blurring, or that it recomposes the interplay between solids and voids as cinema does, when it captures reality, it recomposes it with montage, with game of photography or storytelling. When he selects the one that suits him best to leave only what he likes best.
Here, maybe this: the camera captures life, and the editing cuts away the boring parts. In her paintings Laura Federici does something similar: she captures life, the sail, and reveals it by cutting away the roughness and bubbles of plaster, erasing the hairs and puddles of dirt, the shards of bottles and cracks.
Coating everything with nice, thick oil.
A sort of cinema, in short. An oil cinema, after all "(from the text in the catalog by daniele Lucchetti)
"Laura had brought me pictures of installations that, with others, she had designed. I liked them: they had none of those conventional flavors that usually accompany these projects.
I had published them on “Abitare” challenging the contrary opinions of those who considered them too simple. The encounter with his drawings was not just a meeting, but a departure to discover his "Munarian" projects for schools, his dedication to the representation of uncertain places of passage, which are the constant filigree of his actions.
What can there be in common between those essential and direct installations, which sucked from the great tradition of modernity precisely the simplicity and the skilful play of lights and these “illustrations” so intimate and painted with a technique that can be defined as traditional? I don't know, but there is a thin thread and it is noticeable, if everything can be traced back to the person of Laura Federici, her being outside the box, without irritating demonstrative gestures with her original and non-artificial individuality.
I don't like all the drawings in this exhibition, and I say it right away to give more value and sincerity to the positivity of judgments on his painting in general, on his illustrations guided by curiosity and non-conformism.
It is not so much the natural landscapes as the quick allusions to the corners of urban places; the figures that are there, but they seem to escape quickly or dive into the waters of a swimming pool, which make these drawings memorable. "(from the text in the catalog by Italo Lupi)
Galleria l'Affiche - from 20 November to 12 December 2008