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CECILIA RAVERA ONETO Italian painter Camogli January,3 1918 - Genoa October,27 2002
One of the leading painters of the twentieth century in Liguria. Since May 1st to August 29th 2004 the Civic Gallery of modern arts of Genoa (Nervi) showed an exhibition at Villa Grimaldi Fassio showing the paintings that are its property (a donation made by the artist one year before her death)
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"Autoritratto"
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"Preghiera" - 1985
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1996-"Un vento di speranza nella notte"
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Cecilia Ravera, when painting, never gave up thinking. Out of a continous, persistent dialogue with a reality to be changed into free artistic images, within the working space of a canvas, she has drawn the conviction that the outside world is not a succession of indifferent perceptions, but a place of tensions and continous struggles. All her work is directed towards a search for certain significant intertwinings of these tensions and of these struggles perceiving in the images to be achieved something lying beyond certain representations common reality, that is to say a critical testimony of a being victoriously present in our unexpressed deep inside, against everything seeking to undermine it, to erode it and leave it in a primitive state. The vivid narrative images, wich she offers us, exclude any symbolist reference, as a pictorial poertry. Her expressive language recalls, if even, certain sturdy post-impressionism eradicated from all aesteticizing complaisance, typical of a certain present-day figurative exigency, wich intends to leave always pre-eminence to beings and thins caused.
GIORGIO KAISSERLIAN- THE ART OF CECILIA RAVERA ONETO - Edizioni APE-Genoa 1969
"Night of Albaro"
landscape from a window of artist studio
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'The artist was one of the leading characters of '900 Century painting in Liguria. She attended Accademia Albertina and Politecnico of Turin; she began to exhibit in 1954 in national sphere, taking part in important exhibitions and attaining prizes and manifestations of prestige. The first times of her work was distiguished by the bare and disenchanted welcome of a realism that had nothing to do with the mythical suggestions of the Italian situation in the Thirties of past century. She was always worried about reaching formal and stylistical datas that coincided with the sensitive perception of her look and judgment; Ravera Oneto transcribed, before, through a tender pictorical writing, with a clef of tonal chords and with a thoughtfully absorted drawing, the native landscape turning here attention in the Sixties to radicaly existential themes that was, with a pressing painting, set on fire with chromatic definitions, to all the modification of the natural appearances caused by the iron and steel industry. Simultaneously, developed at the border of a cold espressionism, she made paintings inspired by the health world, the surgical rooms and the new medical engines. Subsequently here painting gave way to a violent and sensual interpretation of nature. Are unforgettable some of her paintings showing dazzling wistaria trees and the night lanscapes rising by the ferocious explosion of the colours. With the death of Ravera Oneto disappears one of the artists that contributed, with their own poetry and introspection, to the vitality of Ligurian painting.
(Germano Beringheli - Il Secolo XIX
October 29, 2002)newspaper, two days after the artist death.
"Autoritratto"
Genoa - from 15 May to the 15 june 2008
MUSEUM DELL' ACADEMY LIGUSTICA OF FINE ARTS
Cecilia Ravera Oneto between glicini and chimneys
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"While I was climbed up one of those that I name "bridge" and they call with technical and abstruse names or, with my tripod bound to the railings to hold out against the wind, I look, from the 90 meters of height of the gasholder, at my subjects, I talk with myself. I furiously draw steel constructions, pinnacles, pipes that breaks the sky , I paint while I breathe its pungent and poisonous aroma, gas and smokes with the oddest colours and I think and I polemize...
Those are the words used by Cecilia Ravera Oneto to describe her work, to be more exact, she tell an important share of her work, that of the industrial landscapes that she began in the Sixties and well testified in this trust. Fabbrica (Factory) (1965) evokes, in the smoky range of greys, the atmosphere described in her words. The drawings of harbour constructions in the Seventies, the first dated 1977, are witness of works that was conceived in similar situations. The wide production of the painter looks to organize itself about two or three lines of research, that cyclicaly recur, as well many years later, associated by a sharp attention to the subject, penetrated and eaperienced till to repeat, in the corporeal pictorial deed, the emotion she felt: the Ligurian lanscape, with or without figures, the industrial landscape, evoked in its strenght and the inside, as well intimate and with figures, or aseptic of the medical surroundings. Versatile artist, Cecilia Ravera Oneto went through a large part of the twentieth century, declining her own language as far as the threshold of the abstraction, with unexhausted attention for that realistic datum that always constitutes the start of her painting, with open temperament for the novelties and continuous love for the painting.
Alessandra Gagliano Candela - PAESAGGI DI UN'ESISTENZA- "Omaggio a una pittrice Cecilia Ravera Oneto"- m&m Maschietto editore-Firenze April 2004
landscape from a window of artist studio
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