Ornella Pocetti | The familiar becomes perturbing
Born in Argentina in 1991, Ornella Pocetti is a young and bright painter and sculptor, who grew up and currently lives in Buenos Aires. She has always been driven by her reflection upon the relationship between feminine identity, nature, archetypes and culture, which she investigates and communicates through the language of art.After the Covid-19 pandemic started, she saw herself and many others immensely struggling as trying to picture a future in a world contaminated with endangering policies, genres and inequality issues and unhealthy neoliberalism.
Image Courtesy: ORNELLA POCETTI
Combining her profound admiration for surrealist artworks by Leonora Carrington, Marcelo Canevari, Leonor Fini and Aleksandra Waliszewska – to mention a few–, with her passion for horror movies and science fiction, Ornella sews a bond between her sensitivity towards contemporary issues and her pronounced inclination for the macabre, the unforeseen and the futuristic.She seizes familiar subjects re-elaborating them within her personal atavistic and mythological narrative, where the quotidian becomes uncanny, grim and perturbing. Indeed, she aims primarily at generating a sense of alienation and disorientation in the viewer, so to push the rational boundaries of our society’s unnatural mindset and, thus, lead to reconsider what is natural and spiritual. An intention to materialize change, movement and disintegration is also present and underlined by her use of translucent and vibrant colours.
Everything recalls a sort of hidden intricated narratives and juxtapositions of absence and presence, whose meaning is sometimes obscure to herself too, but that pertains to a vivid interaction between violence end erotism. Her work summons all our senses, forcing us to abandon our rationality as if we were caged, isolated, in her reality. Nude bodies wear shimmering and precious pearls, created by nature, which are as pure as those painted figures that melt again together with that same flora and fauna. Female and non-binary beings with their blood, bodily fluids, hair and body hairs are as natural as raindrops, leaves, grass, eggs and other elements.
Everything has sprouted from the same matter, responding both actively and passively to the laws of nature’s cycle. She often stated that, for her, painting is a way to defy the concept of death and with it the moral character of our lives, but it is also true that her art makes us aware of that same idea as well as of the fact that we all are one with each other and with nature, despite all the labels, the inequalities, the discriminations and the judgmental behaviour marking nowadays society.
We need to cherish isolation and self-analysis as moments allowing us to reconnect with the spiritual and physical side of our existence, to learn how to live respectfully and consciously. Since 2020, Ornella is actively working on a series called Las furias and she is now painting for her forthcoming solo show in Argentina. The artworks suspended between the real and the unforeseen lies Ornella’s imaginary world, merging surrealistic erotism with a personal quest aimed at grasping the essence of living in unbalanced times.
By Jessica Pividori