“Alfabeti & Memorie” Rosetta Berardi & Maeda Kamari
Cesena | Italy

 

 

 

The double solo exhibition “Alfabeti & Memorie” (Alphabets & Memories) features artists Rosetta Berardi & Maeda Kamari inside the evocative nineteenth-century church of Santa Cristina, in Cesena, Italy is part of the project “Cosmografie & Alfabeti” (Cosmographies & Alphabets) that is focused on the artistry of the “alphabets of the world”.

 

The cycle of paintings by Rosetta Berardi (San Michele di Ganzaria, 1944), presented on the ground floor of the Church, concerns exclusively a segment of her broader research: calligraphy, the result of emotional sedimentations and stratifications of journeys made over time. Paintings of writing, where the letters of these alphabets – Chinese, Aramaic, Hindi – become abstract symbolic forms of pure beauty. The artist shifts the center of gravity of her research to some primary letters of a world-alphabet to authentically capture a sampling of that infinite variety of the universe. To capture those different signs that men stigmatize in their alphabets. A plural system of symbols and codes that, through art, becomes a pure abstraction of beauty.

 

With the works of Master Shodo Maeda Kamari (Fukui Prefecture, 1973), set up in the crypt of the Church, we explore this fascinating language solely from an artistic point of view: signs, ideograms, and kanji as custodians of meaning and representations of unknown linguistic verbal signs. Freed from the conventions of language, beyond the sound that these symbols contain and preserve, now it is only the eye that introjects form and beauty. Eight ceramic plates, decorated with kanji and a “prayer of peace,” a large sheet with black ink intervention, serve as a testimony to the performance performed on site in 2022, and are exhibited in the crypt of the church.