The works of Julie Polidoro represent landscapes: vast pieces of land painted from a bird’s eye view and broad skies of crystalline brightness.
Paintings with a few colours on large flax canvases, hung like banners, these landscapes flutter at the slightest breath of air and have the spaciousness of the sky, the essence ofan incarnate thought, the vagueness ofaflight of mind; they have the intensity of feelings and the lightness of scudding clouds. ihe dominant colours are vibrant blues and grcens, made with pure pigments. The backgrounds are spread directly on an untreated canvas that still shows signs of folding. And the canvas is visible, both around the painted surface, along the outline of the image, flaming it, and in between the paintings, becoming itselfa colour, where the artist would otherwise have had to use white. 7his effect suggests watercolours.
Sometimes the painting process takes place in the dark, or on canvases hung only by the upper edge: as if to include chance in the creative process, freed from self-imposed limits of technical skill and self-control: a means oxploiting impulses and contingencies, to adhere to scenarios that gradually emerge with a flexibility that is not improvised, but the result of choice.
In many cases Polidoro’s painted skies and landscapes are marked by a grid: they thus acquire the appearance of maps. This is not, however, to express a measured rationality; rather than ordering or dividing, these grids show the desire to recognise territory, to find correspondence.
The works of Julie Polidoro also include traces of quickly sketched figures, in pencil, before moving on to the pigment; or they show words and short phrases, synthetic elocutions, without anecdotal significance; phrases that do not provide precise chronological and geographical coordinates, yet refer to time – in five minutes; day after tomorrow – or word games that recall ideas, moments, everyday personal situations: elements that foreshadow relationships, that allude to things that actually exist, like emotions, or clouds; but like clouds, they remain elusive and unstoppable; and they render the works timely, although they concern the expanded timeliness of a timeless present. As just mentioned, these elements do not raise claims of ownership, but are suggestions and openings to countless possible connections, beyond the visual. Îlhis freedom, this unexpected quality is what matters most for the artist. The presence of a void, an incomplete dimension, in fact, deliberately sought and as evident in the above-mentioned elements as in leaving areas of unpainted canvas, give Polidoro’s work an enigmatic atmosphere, but also a conscious and deliberate polysemantic quality. They allow chance to be assumed as a key agent, but also leave plenty of room for interpretation and the search for possibilities, encouraging sharing and the establishment of an area where the borders are fluid: thus in some of her works human figures are lying on the ground as though seeking to immerse themselves in the vitality of nature to capture its essential force: an integration of body and landscape, the specific and the universal, which indicates the ability to surrender to natural cycles, to an organic relationship with the world that allows recovery of the self.
“My breath, your breath”, Polidoro writes on one of her paintings. Is it possible to breathe in unison? Where does my breath end, and yours begin? At what point do they blend, in the ether that is all around us? In her world, as in reality, there are no clear boundaries, but porosity, openness, care and attention to change; and a deep awareness that we are all exposed to circumstances and metamorphosis.
Julie Polidoro’s work is allusive and digressive, but not elusive. Her basic language has the sense of meditation before landscape and nature. Her modus operandi, which deliberately avoids all special effects, corresponds with her view of the world. It expresses, without demonstrative woodenness, the search for an alternative to consumerism, to gesticulation, to constant haste, to the proliferation of signs that, related to pollution of vision and thought, saturate the mind and lead to carelessness.
Her images are lyrical, visionary and sensitive, highly emotional, but devoid of sentimentality. Her vibrant landscapes and mobile skies filled with scudding clouds suggest a new way of thinking about the world, and indicate that everything has its own inner transforming power; that beyond contingencies everything is subject to revision, and nothing is acquired once and for all. Îlhey thus represent impermanence, transience, the discontinuity of perception, but also persistence, and an organic unity of all things. An organic quality that unfolds over time: “Infinity is not a stable state, but growth itself”, as Aristotle said.
To today’s throwaway society, of immediate gratification, Julie Polidoro offers a pause for reflection, and counters with the ongoing search for balance in a fragile and vulnerable reality.
We feel drawn into her breathing landscapes, into the strangely pure vibration of colour. The natural element of her skies, as well as the artificial, cultivated landscape that we know, are not felt solely as something beyond, but around us. They aflect us, surround us and involve us. Thus, in the contact between the landscape and the observer, between the world and man, Julie Polidoro gives tangible form to the relativity of time and reality, and of the bond, always particular and personal, that each of us has with nature, to the countless and always subjective possibilities of finding a balance and a freedom in a fragile reality. These works reveal breadth and intimacy: and we feel, as in the words of Maria Zambrano, like someone who returns to the “primary condition of an inhabitant of the universe, oflering his presence […]”. One also perceives a poetic wondering about meaning, and a loneliness, an anxiety: the anxiety of one who constantly tries to decipher original feeling, of one who pauses to seek and to ask, rather than rushing towards the finality of an answer.