catalogue, Centro Ipermedia, Ferrara, 1982

The thin surface like an epidermis, rosy, delicate as a skin, is encrusted with gold, folds away, hides small images hinted at in the folds. The gauze doubles, ripples, hides hints allusions and everything that appears on the surface remains undefined, but evocative.

Who identifies himself with the object looks in himself as if he were to look in the folds of his physicality sibilline intuitions, but immediate.

A search for the Dionysian in the complex and delicate world of its objectized body. To preserve a physicality, the object is placed at the center of a delicate alchemy where the measure of the factors is fundamental, an almost ritual measure, as if the sacredness implicit in the body had to be transmitted to the objects and the artist was the initiate of a very long emerge to the knowledge whose rigorous, painful existential curiosity was, experience after experience, tested by the object itself.

The lucid narration of this itinerary condenses into the object, whose soft, soft appearance welcomes in its folds, in its interstices, hard signs, castings of gold and precious color, images barely hinted at, but all hidden and fleeting: hermetic.

The gauze that often covers the smoked frames or glasses, which welcome objects of indefinite form, hides the fluidity of the compositions that, in some cases, can change with every breath of air. In this gauze a wavy line is lightly insinuated, sometimes marked by scratches, sometimes by interventions of color dripped and material, to mark a succession, the course and the course of what is above. So in this overlapping of the plans that hide and reveal each other, the shifting of readings, converging or divergent, becomes disturbing in the small violent, aggressive emerging signs. As in an antique mirror one must imagine, reconstructing from some small details the complex of what is reflected in it, and looking first you have the enchantment of the color of the mirror, then the restlessness of the image corroded by time, so watching Mariella Bettineschi’s work was suspended between pleasure and uneasiness.

The materials used, although they include a wide range of natural elements, have been examined by an obsessive manual, which re-elaborates and rebuilds them completely; this is true both for gauze and for natural wool, as for feathers or gold. 

In the composition, everything is reworked as a deceptive and enigmatic function with respect to those who work, as well as those who read.

The condition of a perceptiveness to be dilated, provoked and led by ideas, allusions, enigmas is the counterweight of a sensuality highlighted and liberated by a long struggle against long-standing inhibitions.