Once upon a time there was "stagnant" art made up of farce representations and an "empty aesthetic of fixed forms". So at least, according to Lucio Fontana, in his 1946 Manifiesto Blanco. It was with his revolutionary gesture to cut and pierce the canvas that he went from a two-dimensional painting to a multi-dimensional painting, a painting capable of combining space and time . A painting that makes the canvas a substance, a self-sufficient being. It is from this lesson that Vanna Nicolotti starts, who studies graphics with Oscar Signorini and then with him founds D'Ars, the oldest contemporary art magazine in Italy, which has accompanied the evolution of art in crucial years such as the years '60 -'70. The same ones in which Nicolotti's talent explodes. The artist's creations are born from the spatialist lesson, from the cancellation of any superfluous, marginal message. Not just cuts, holes, tears, but real structures. Precise slits, refined and geometric cuts that transform themselves to the observer's gaze. Now they are windows, now doors, now air vents. Nicolotti goes beyond spatialism by entering a current called Rigorismo, which he shares with Fontana but also with Agostino Bonalumi, Turi Simeti, Enrico Castellani.
The only woman among illustrious masters who know how to take the space and make it speak, the space indeed becomes the work itself. Space as such, space as art. “It will always and only the same space, as such, be determined; and not to accept the determined - writes the philosopher Massimo Donà in a presentation of the Rigorism - That is, to distinguish himself by virtue of a temporalizing power destined to distinguish ... in making himself a negation of what for it, however and every time, however, manages to distinguish itself (and therefore to take up space). Making the space as such determined in the first place. Objectifying it, that is… but not as something that would simply be accepted by the patient opening made up of it. Or that, in it, he could only say what this same something had come to be in time and space. No, here we are saying that it is space itself that can become an object and therefore a work ". A pure, precise, perfect and simple job. Strict. But not rigid, because in each one emerges the particular sensitivity of the artist. In Nicolotti's work a refined sensitivity emerges, an elegant idea of form that folds and shapes itself in her skilled hands. Several layers of canvas overlap giving a three-dimensional effect, shapes and colors underlie these layers making them visual objects capable of offering the observer optical and chromatic illusions.
We move in front of his works as we do in an architectural work, discovering a new vision at every step. His cuts become presences. Bearers of mysteries, conductors of labyrinthine experiences, they hide and reveal. Not already "empty aesthetics of fixed forms", they are windows on new worlds.