aLESSANDRa giovannoni

volevo metterci il cielo

with a text by michele tocca

francesca antonini arte contemporanea, rome

from march 20th 2025

Volevo metterci il cielo (I wanted to include the sky). 

On recent paintings by Alessandra Giovannoni. 

Michele Tocca

There is no painting in which the sky is missing, even if it's just a glimmer, a head in the clouds, or in the form of a tube of ultramarine: the sky is never absent. One could continue like this throughout the entire text, following an endless list of celestial metaphors. After all, that’s what we do when we talk about paintings, we speak in metaphors. Therefore, that "I wanted to include the sky" exclaimed by the artist absentmindedly while showing me her latest works, is not just a spontaneous admission but also our initial metaphor that holds more weight than many "I didn't paint the sky here’s." This is even more true on the rooftop of an early 20th-century condominium, an observatory where the sun is present for almost the entire dawn-to-dusk span until the moon takes over; and if that artist is Alessandra Giovannoni (Rome, 1954), a landscapist from the start, who has painted hundreds of skies.

Giovannoni's studio in Rome is just like that, a tower made of window frames without glass. It is a tower of winds and storms, heat and drought; not at all reassuring, even though it dominates the quiet roofs of the Quartiere Africano, a composed, sweet, and somewhat cloying neighbourhood in Rome. I wanted to include the sky became the title of her exhibition there in her studio, when I sensed she let slip a phrase like that (something like "I could have included, I wanted to include, the sky") while rummaging through the still slightly stretched canvases on temporary frames.

Up there, there is no escape from the sky. For an artist who has painted so many skies in a long career, to say "I wanted to include the sky" in hindsight, without having done it, is akin to feeling the sky as a regret. To hear it, hence, sounds like a renunciation too loaded with meaning to let it slip away. These are words that resonate, and I caught them after a while as they were fluttering around the studio, suspecting they could encapsulate something of the essence of this series of works from 2024: to lose one's head and start from the tail, to isolate oneself and divert the gaze straight ahead and downwards, getting lost in the infinitesimal. Urban weeds instead of Mediterranean pines, fountains instead of buildings, flat walls and sidewalks instead of linear perspectives. These are new motifs, but not entirely unexpected for the painter. For years they were secondary elements that appeared in some corner of a painting and served as compositional punctuations. In short, they are all terms of a lexicon that Giovannoni has thus far used to stage plots, architect scenes, and sketch extras. Looking at the latest paintings, instead, one can sense a profound need, a call to trigger an exploration of the character of each of those small pictorial props.

Let’s go in order and follow the coordinates of the trajectory in which the artist operates, the immediate surroundings of the studio, an imaginary border where she isolates, not without excursions – sometimes to Cinecittà, more often to the Lungotevere, and in this latest group of works, also to Villa Pamphili. Everything usually takes place between the Nomentana, Villa Borghese, Via di Castro Pretorio, passing through Piazza della Croce Rossa to Via di Villa Patrizi. The ritual repeats: she walks and walks, she photographs and sketches the subjects she will work on in the studio. It is during her explorations in mostly familiar areas that the spark ignites, the strange appears as small, wonderful epiphanies that arrest her gaze. If until now the ritual was always performed through a certain distance of which Giovannoni was a detached spectator-director – orthogonal and perspective projections of distances, heights, the verticalities of trees and buildings, and anonymous figures – now the interest lies in proximity. The gaze lowers and approaches the subjects: the first is a plant, a tuft of daisies emerging from the crevice of a wall on the Lungotevere. On the canvas, the three daisies seem etched, trembling on a stone surface that looks like concrete, given the rough chromatic rendering of the painting dedicated entirely to the flowers. From here, from a piece of childish and microcosmic simplicity, begins this focus on details that characterizes the new works. 

An unprecedented course for the artist, who has always aimed for a grandiloquent plasticity in her compositions, a photographic, wide-angle breadth. Little remains of this panoramic conception; perhaps the only link to more traditional pictorial methods for the artist seems at first glance the large painting Pianta di capperi al Casale dei Cedrati. Yet even here, although fundamentally architectural, the cut is more iconic, the close-up more intimate. Observing the two shadowed arches of the farmhouse in Villa Pamphilj, another typical element of Giovannoni, the extreme chiaroscuro reminiscent of Mario Sironi, plays a decidedly different role. With that heavy, overloaded perception of fullness and the empty areas that never really succeed in being empty, it is still a dull chiaroscuro, a claustrophobic apnoea. But it is so to make the depth of the niche from which those impetuous capers emerge, feel intensified. Like in the painting of the daisies, where the colour of the stone is left dull to exalt the little plant, in this one too, everything is functional to the subject's emergence. Is it not to emphasize the emergence of the green of the capers that the white of the stone is mixed with such a precisely complementary Alizarin Crimson red?

Speaking of green, I believe that this interest in the emergence of the infinitesimal  has ultimately occurred thanks to the Tevere, to the series of works dedicated to the Tevere that the artist exhibited in 2020. Within the artist’s oeuvre, these green monochromes, paintings of foliage, are the first to hide the sky, pushing the artist's gaze downwards, towards the city's depths. Giovannoni, after all, has always considered Rome her mentor. The city is not just a subject, it is a muse. Like a little goddess on her shoulder urging, guiding, and prodding her, Rome gives directions and spoils her, creates dreams and traps: their relationship is total, shaping and leading her into unusual territories, profoundly distinguished from the artists of her generation.

Reflecting for a moment on Giovannoni's formation, I am sure that the secret of her autonomy in the Italian art scene is rooted in her relationship with the city. 

By formation, I do not mean her personal aesthetic canon; nor her university and academic training. I really mean the genesis of her work: the choice to paint landscapes. Giovannoni's choice as a young woman artist in the 1980s is a courageous and reckless decision, fully individual in a context where such specific discussions about painting genres were still far from being re-addressed. 

Running the risk of appearing passé, this choice has decisively allowed her to filter everything happening around her with freedom. She emerged unscathed from the influence of movements like Neo-Expressionism and Anachronism, which were so crucial during the years of her debut; she did not associate with the jargon of her contemporaries from the San Lorenzo School. She observed everything with admiration, but from a distance. It is her love for the Roman landscape, especially that of her daily life, that has allowed her to find an alternative to the contemporary artistic milieu and to resist. The Rome that has informed Giovannoni is neither a contemporary context nor a cultural stratification; it is a living and self-sufficient entity, a sort of entelechy that is enough for her to forge the slow work on landscape for which she is known today. In the secluded relationship and silent exchange with the city, there have been no artistically kindred interlocutors; the time was not yet ripe. However, by walking through her avenues, watching the world beneath her pines, chasing the long shadows of some unknown tourist cast onto the asphalt, Giovannoni has nonetheless arrived at a place of her own. She immediately sensed, without being able to fully understand it, a sensitivity closer to the themes and the making of the painting of the following decade: urban views and the relationship with nature, the anonymity and alienation of the figure in the landscape, the dystopian sublime. Thus, she found herself, untimely, brushing against the shores of the kind of painting that would emerge from the 1990s onwards, in America and Northern Europe long before Italy – the similarities and comparisons with certain modes of Peter Doig (UK, 1959), the framing of Carla Klein (NL, 1964), and the perspectives of the younger Koen van den Broek (BE, 1973), among many others, would be fascinating explorations.

I would say it is thanks to Rome that the artist has never feared to be misunderstood in the decisive moments of her artistic choices and still manages to remain mysterious and explorative today: she has never ceased to search, allowing herself to make mistakes and risk after so many years.

Why not take risks again? Why not continue to get her hands dirty? 

For Giovannoni, painting today is about emerging from nooks and crannies, seeking the sun without taking it for granted. There cannot be a sky, because painting all lies in a process of disembowelment. There are no longer the umbrella-like crowns of maritime pines or cypress trees, but the roots can be felt. There is no sky, perhaps there is merely a reflection in the water of the cast-iron basin of a fountain. The sky brought to earth by a tree branch bursting between the railing of a staircase and the bricks of a wall. Or, perhaps, painting is a heliotrope that, as its name suggests, grows and turns towards the sun. A legendary plant – the magical plant once associated with the most varied remedies, from snake bites to invisibility potions – that now invades the sidewalks of Rome, as in Piazza della Croce Rossa, where its venomousness is rendered by the clawed and threatening shadow it casts. It is a paradoxically dark painting that would seem a nocturnal if it were not for the white of the travertine and, indeed, the reach of the shadow. Giovannoni remembers exactly where she was when she saw, photographed, noted the moment of encountering each of these plants. She remembers the hour and the day, the temperature, and the weather during her walk. For those viewing the paintings, it is impossible to trace back to that kind of precision. 

The palette is always the result of a reworking; it is filtered. I think of the darkness of Piazza della Croce Rossa, but also the decidedly non-atmospheric white in Fico selvatico in Villa Albani. The palette is a fundamental element to understand her process. The way the artist reworks colour reveals that her account of reality is neither physical nor surreal but lies in that tenuous boundary between perception and dream known as rêverie. Consciousness and the unconscious alternate, lighting up and dimming within each single work, connecting us with unexpected psychic depths. Perhaps there is something childish, playful, in this state.

Perhaps it is in the gaze. Or perhaps it is in the act: as when children draw, neglecting everything else to arrive at what they want to draw, a little tree, a princess, a horse, so in every painting Giovannoni can’t wait to paint the plants. She does it at all costs.

Otherwise, behind this process, there is perhaps a passionate adherence to these  marginal vegetable existences, to how they bring the wild back into the city, reclaim places, and re-inhabit them, making them their own. There is an identification.

In Rome, they no longer even uproot these plants; they go unnoticed, they are, oxymoronically, of vital irrelevance. They clutter, they dirty, but they are not uncivilised or vandalistic: after all, it is easier to identify with their ways and motives of existence than with other bipedal living forms in this barbaric time.

It is no coincidence, then, that one day Giovannoni's gaze fell, among the many natural clusters that can be encountered in Rome, precisely on the so-called daisies of the walls, an asteraceous plant often seen among the stones of the forum, the walls of Trastevere, the Aurelian fortifications. I see countless of them. It is an evergreen, it withstands pollution, thrives in both sun and shade, in winter and summer, and in the seasons in between.

Michele Tocca (Subiaco, 1983) is a painter based in Rome. Made indoors and outdoors, his paintings depict phenomena, durations, circumstances in the physical world as a continuous overlap between sensory, tactile immediacy and the spontaneous recurrence of visual archetypes and aesthetic problems when working from life. In this respect, he has contributed texts on artists that range from Thomas Jones to the present. Recent solo exhibitions include: Hm, He, Ha (with Pesce Khete), Fondazione Coppola, Vicenza, 2024; Poca notte, z2o Sara Zanin, Rome, 2024; Repoussoir, GAM – Galleria Civica di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin.