Ester Grossi is a pretty girl, with a frail physic and slight features. Black hair and big dark eyes, porcelain complexion. The first time I met her she reminded me of Amelie, the character of the French movie that seems to have come out from a fairy world. Her delicate aspect though contains a great strength of mind.
She is aware of her extraordinary talent, she knows how to use it, what she wants and how to achieve it. A modern Amelie who, tired of dreaming, decided to make the real world her fairy tale by using flat colors combined with bright and pastel shades, geometric shapes and perfect lines. A superhuman precision, the same with which is drawn the eyeliner line that adorns her big eyes. I never saw her without it.
Ester Grossi is born in 1981 in Avezzano, right in the center of the Italy’s green heart between Rome, Pescara and the Gran Sasso’s National Park. Her background in Fashion and Design is still visible in the decorative patterns that fill the big canvases’ surfaces, and in the aesthetic perfection of figures, faces and landscapes. After her diploma she moved to Bologna, where she still lives and works, to accomplish a Master’s in History of Cinema. Here is where the broad and raised framings come from, all those faces of a mysterious gaze into foreground illuminated by pop colors neatly defined, all the lovers that seem to have come out from a 50’s movie, portrayed in such dramatically romantic scenes. I would like to live in one of those paintings, the light is so warm, the sky so deep, the time suspended. Everything is perfect.
One of the best Ester Grossi’s work that I have had the opportunity to see is Deep down inside the Color, the double exhibition of the Italian Amelie and of the princess Ingeborg zu Schleswig-Holstein hosted at the Art Gallery Spazio Testoni (Bologna, IT) in winter 2016. Explosions of colors have invaded all the 4 white rooms of the gallery, each room one color: blue, pink, red, silver 8you can see the hole work in here)
Ester Grossi’s murals converse with Ingeborg’s paintings on the common ground of pure color, so pure that it goes deep down inside. While spurts of color come to light from Ingeborg’s canvases, the walls host the maniacally precise Ester Grossi’s images. Needless to say, they’re freehand painted. Irregular shapes open light’s holes inside the Space, the red is the perfect Red, the blue the perfect Blue. I believe that this work like no one else shows the artist’s particular sensitivity for summary, the same from which arise the buildings of Token series, or the swans of Lumen.
Looking at the polished contours with no smears, neither a microscopic drop out of place, I can imagine the little Amelie working patiently. All her dreams poured into sharp lines, spots of color such evenly spread out that you can’t find a single, careless white dot in them. In this way it is natural, therefore, that they come alive.