In the following works the color disappears and everything is white: a sinuous and liberty line, in relief, sculpts abstract concepts as if they were concrete and present. The disappearance of color makes up for a material research that the photo-graphic reproductions, even accurate ones, cannot faithfully render: the background of the paintings thickens and thickens, mellow but not rough, real and abstract at the same time. Like Dante in Paradise, the artist’s effort is to make the unrepresentable true and alive, the inconceivable that exists beyond earthly coordinates. However, a residue of stylization remains in Crystallization or in feminine energy, an external elegance that could be mistaken for calligraphy.
The series of works with the common title Unione undertakes to establish the definitive mood: the residual of the fin de siécle style has been abandoned, the line becomes primordial and archetypal, atemporal; the nervous and irregular line deeply affects the top and brings out the consistency of the material. At this point they can also return, the figures, to such an extent they belong to another planet, a psychic planet (not for nothing we have titles like Pisces / Unconscious). They overlook this world, but they do not belong to it. If anything, the large dimensions offer these works as mirrors, not faithful mirrors but Alice’s mirrors, or windows on parallel worlds, magical extensions to enter. The conquest of three-dimensionality, as Rothko teaches us, is also a fact of dimensions: navigating the paintings, getting lost in them … The large table La mamma is to be considered one of the boldest and highest outcomes of Yolanda’s entire production.
Control, Embrace, Earth recover a color that is precisely earth, materiality, with a barbaric trait reminiscent of the twentieth century current (Tozzi, Campigli). It is a figuration that has only metaphorical and non-descriptive intentions, it produces masks or avatars with which to enter into (spiritistic?) Communication, categories of being.
There are no models and points of reference in the research initiated by Yolanda. They are solitary and personal works, not comparable to specific figures, to which no direct derivation can be attributed. There you can find something of the collages of Matisse or of the less known Braque, the figurative one of the second postwar period, in which doves travel in abolished skies. The themes and the accentuated stylization of the shilouettes refer to Virgilio Guidi of Encounters and Waiting, but without harshness and Beckettian nihilism. And there are echoes of the Catalan lesson (from Tapiès to Barcelò) in the thickness of the layers, obtained through the careful use of materials: gypsum, clay and earth absorb light and luminosity and create a material limbo, a base on which the stylized contours float.
Understanding this world is also a tactile, atmospheric matter. And the last, very recent phase, still open and in full development, is definitely launching towards the occupation of space. Inner strength and self-knowledge are experiments, working hypotheses still in progress, but they suggest results of great complexity linked to a multiple, and no longer frontal, perception of the works. The time has come for Yolanda to ensnare the astonished spectator, to convert him, to physically involve him in this hyperspace whose construction appears almost the result of a scientific modus operandi, if we consider the linearity and coherent intensification of the experiments conducted.
I imagine that an exhibition by Yolanda, at this point, would appear as a concentrated universe of curtains, veils, tables, mirrors, stratified opacifications to welcome the spirits, create a psychic communion, cultivate a hope of collective salvation that the obtuse reason does not can grasp.
Enrico Formica