Maria Pia Lattanzi sees animals as the embodiment of instinct and an animalistic elemental force that can only be found in the natural world.
She has been working on her series of “animal paintings”, as she calls them, since 2013. We recognise birds, a deer or even a fox, for example, in the motifs. “Animals are where the emotional, the emphatic is at home,” says Lattanzi. Animal symbolism is multifaceted. We only have to think of the multifaceted symbols in animal fables. But that is not the artist’s main concern, even if the bird, for example, symbolises freedom for her. She is more interested in concepts such as attachment, relationships, purity and wildness, belonging to nature, man as part of nature. For her, animals epitomise the primordial, a primal force that lies beyond the mind.
It usually takes several layers of paint before Lattanzi’s canvases are finished. The artist works using the egg tempera technique – an old master glazing technique – which means that the first layers applied show through from below until the last top layer. In this way, Lattanzi achieves a very differentiated depth structure in her works. She combines figurative and abstract or ornamental pictorial elements and forms and merges them into a single entity.
Her works are about emotions, empathy and reality or truthfulness. As a rule, her motifs express the decided or unconscious intention to depict a section of her personal reality as succinctly as possible, perhaps in order to clarify various things for herself. By finding the motifs, by the choice of animal depictions, by the painterly levels of depth, by the painting process itself, she always seems to know something better about herself, about her social environment, about what is happening in the world.
Hartwig Knack
Art historian and cultural scientist
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
