Alba
Savoi
Biography
Alba Savoi was born in 1929 in Rome, where she lives and works. From her figurative beginning in the end of the 1960s, she shifted her attention to the textile art. From 1977 onwards, all of her works are characterized by symbolic and concrete values: canvases with folds, with cuts, overlaps. In 1980 she became part of the association AM16 in Rome which was interested in Abstract and Concrete Art, and thus she exhibited in various exhibitions in Paris, Vienna and Brazil. Since 1987 she has been exploring photography and photocopying, tools through which she exaggerates her attention to new means, xero-reliefs and xero-sculptures, where the form expands through shadows and lights in the interstices. Her artistic path, experimental, logical and coherent, moves towards the conceptual through diversified research fields and a spirit oriented towards play, paradox and ironic desecration.
Her work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions in numerous cultural organizations worldwide, including: the Biennial of São Paulo in Brazil, the Venice Biennial, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington Grand Palais in Paris, the Palazzo dei Priori in Perugia, the University of Bologna, the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Rome, among others. Since 2000 she is part of the cultural association Fuori Centro.
Critical text
“Alba Savoi has planned her whole creative path on the elaboration of the fold, which, for this reason is not only a formal event, but the precise and complex concept of Deleuze, based on Leibniz’s philosophical intuition, leading back to the Baroque as the essence of a problematic exceeding its temporal limits (…) The pressure encouraging energy in art is the simple gesture to contradict the plan, so that pushing it to extreme consequences does not necessarily require titanic and absolute acts, and essentiality does not lead to minimal asepsis. The crease determines a thin depth exhibited with all the irony of covering–discovering, veiling-revealing, enveloping-developing, as an ability peculiarly related to a female subject starting a different dimension. Savoi moves radical optics to a perspective of symbolic torsion, permitting evidence of a different order. This operation has been recognized exactly by the sensitive view of a woman, Mirella Bentivoglio, who described it with respect to mythical associations between cloth and femininity from a “semiopsychological” point of view.”
_Patrizia Ferri
