Monica Rossetti crystallizes reality in glass frits

We’ve met with Monica Rossetti, one of the protagonistsof the collective contemporary art exhibition “Arte e Salute. Alle radici della prevenzione”
Monica Rossetti – Tulipani Italiani

We’ve met with Monica Rossetti, one of the protagonists of the collective contemporary art exhibition “Arte e Salute. Alle radici della prevenzione”, exploring the theme of Tree and promoted by SIBioC (the Italian society of clinical biochemistry and molecular biology) within its digital project “Family Health”.

As a graduate in Audiovisual Design and Development, Monica has been working in communications for over ten years. She started as a video maker, taking care of directing, shooting and editing each project. While working behind the camera, she discovered a burning passion for photography, especially for portraits. Fascinated by images, she is constantly searching for beauty, both in video-making and photography: when capturing moments, she goes beyond the image in itself to leave “a scar in the memory”, to let a love bloom.

Monica Rossetti - Tulipani
Monica Rossetti – Tulipani Italiani

Her inspiration – and consequently her best shots – often stem from a thoughtful observation of reality that transcends appearance to grasp its hidden essence.

She finds it intriguing to experiment with transferring photos onto different supports. Right now, she is mostly interested in fusing pictures into glass, a technique she used in the artwork on display at Palazzo Pirelli’s Spazio Eventi in Milan.

Monica, we’ve been absolutely struck by your artwork. The child’s intense look and the power of the nature around him, both encased in a fragile shell of glass, with edges as light as lace.

What inspires your art?

Capturing the poetry of everyday life, always looking at reality with fresh new eyes. This is what fascinates me. “Beauty will save the world”, and I have no doubts about it.

The beauty, harmony and grace innate to everything around us, often invisible to us as we are absorbed by our daily routines, can help us live better lives, authentically express ourselves and focus our attention on the famous glass half full.

This is how my art is born, from this continuous research of harmony, of the poetry of nature we are immersed in, to turn it into artworks.

I hear many artists talking about pain and suffering as the only ways to let out how they feel, but I believe the exact opposite: I think that by representing beauty, we can only enhance what is already beautiful inside and around us.

It is something everyone can do, I have simply decided to nurture it.

I often get inspired by carefully observing reality to go beyond images and grasp their deepest nature. This is also how I created my best shots.

My secret? To look at reality through the eyes of a child. No overthinking, no superstructures. “I liked it, so I took a picture of it” is one of my favorite mottos.

You’ve chosen to express yourself through a really peculiar technique. Can you tell us what it is about?

While photography remains my “communication channel”, I’ve decided to take it one step further: to experiment with transferring pictures onto different materials.

At some point along my journey, I came across Silvia Levenson, a terrific artist of glass who introduced me to this world and showed me how to love this fragile, poetic material.

Fusing pictures into glass is a truly satisfying artistic experience, as you can create unique, unrepeatable pieces.

When you take an artwork out of the oven, you might end up with something totally unexpected, sometimes different than what you had in mind. You feel more or less like a child opening a present on Christmas Day: a mix of expectation, surprise and enthusiasm.

There are various ways of fusing images into glass. For this work in particular, “Un sorriso tra le foglie” (“A smile in the leaves”), I decided to use a picture I had taken during a trip to Madagascar  ̶ a free, happy boy up on a tree, who looked at the camera I was pointing at him with his big ebony eyes, and made one of the truest smiles I had ever seen before.

The technique I used is called “glass frit”. It lookslike a work fused to the glass, or sugar, but it is nothing more than melted powder.

The first fusion creates a base with irregular edges, unique as all artworks should be.

During the second step, a picture is fused onto this pane to create what you could see at the exhibition “Arte e Salute. Alle radici della prevenzione”.

The graphics, transparencies and colors that this material allows to create are the real magic.

Where do your creative ideas come from?

They just come, there isn’t much thinking behind them. As I said before, “I liked it, so I took a picture of it”: if something works in my mind, I try to create it, without limiting myself too much. I just do it.

I try to look at the world as a child would, to look for what’s beautiful and harmonious in it, for what brings me joy.

I like to take by the hand whomever struggles to express their authentic selves, for whatever reasons, and help them see the beauty they have inside and around them. And there’s just so much of it.

 

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