BIOGRAPHY
Born in Catania in 1950. While still a child, she fell in love with photography, almost for fun, then going on to cultivate this passion for her whole life. She attended the European Photography Institute, gaining experience at a very early age in studios in Brera, in addition to working with Lionel Pasquon.
Today she is a highly successful visual artist who has found, in photography and holography the channels of expression that best cater for her need to delve into the soul of things and penetrate the meanderings of their essence. Her first works were photo reports of her trips to Japan, Ethiopia, India and Burma .
Instinctive and curious, she offers an important repertory of the identity of eastern culture, through its costumes, different ethnic groups and culinary traditions, with all its unique reflections in everyday life.
Frammenti d’identità, Donne di Birmania, are two of the artist’s first and best-known photography collections, in which she captures native peoples in moments of everyday life, with her lens.
Her discerning, filtering eye stops to focus on the gazes of women, children and elderly people, brimming with life.
Her works go far beyond the concept of “photo reports”. They are spawned by the desire to discover the depth of the intimate secrets hidden in the faces she encounters, captured in her shots, where time stands still.
The artist admirably succeeds in using details to reconstruct a journey of the soul, into the subject’s intimate essence, offering it directly to the beholder.
Later, although the theme of her artistic output remained the same, it no longer tended to capture Ritratti dell’anima (portraits of the soul)but the Paesaggi dell’Anima (landscapes of the soul).
This led Rossella to begin her research on the four elements: fire, water, earth and air, which took her to the four corners of the earth.
Shots captured through a microscopic, then enlarged look at isolated details, elements of nature broken down and shown out of context, opening the doors to abstract and metaphysical perceptions.
In Alchimie lineari, the photographer’s eye spots deserted, icy lands, rocky landscapes and mountain horizons, reproposed as horizontal sedimentations of shapes and colours merged to inspire new thrilling visions.
The series of works entitled “Cruel colors” represents fire, “Alchimie Lineari” symbolises water, “Il Respiro del Cielo” is earth and “Le Radici dell’Aria” is inspired by air. These works are the result of a long creative process sparked by the need to overcome pain and suffering by ultimately sublimating them in a research that captures the elements leading to beauty, simplicity and purity.
In achieve this result, the artist has worked by “stripping” her images of all recognisable references in order to place them in a timeless dimension.
This operation has enabled her to shift her attention from realistic definition of her subject to the pure forms that characterise it, following a path of research that achieves a balance: that of the photographic composition, but also the inner balance achieved by the photograph itself.
Finally, in 2012, the artist began experimenting in holography, competently mastering the technique with truly admirable results.
Her holographic works propose imaginary scenes that evoke the grandiose transformations of the land. They accompany the dizzying and spiralling transformation of the images to the movement of water, air, fire and earth.
In this production too, the artists investigates her inner self, aiming to remove the pain of her ego by projecting three-dimensional images that fluctuate in the air.
The Catania-born artist’s technical ability is more than a mere form of artistic virtuosity: it is synonymous with a survey of the tools of her art, used to dig deeply and comprehensively into the personality.