The Language of Things

by prof. Giuliano Menato

Claudia Bettega’s works aim to spark a dialogue and forge a relationship. They transform a neutral surface, like canvas, giving it a personality. Claudia works with concepts and ideas, not with archetypes or stereotypes. She focuses on things that belong to shared experience, to common knowledge. Her images do not emerge from the unconscious but from visual information, and they are more instinctive than interior. By accepting to depict figures in their banality, she stages subjects that acquire meaning the moment a gaze falls upon them. The viewer of her figures is not a machine, but someone who thinks, desires, delights, grows bored. Claudia embraces an art that intertwines with everyday life and, at the same time, dreams—an art that draws its forms from life and stretches beyond it. She does not seek to convey obscure messages, but simply to capture the viewer’s attention and make them think about what they see. To focus her energy on a single message would confine her, so she prefers to venture into the unknown and the fantastical, as shown in those works where figures idealized by the media are replaced with images born of pure imagination. Her primarily formal interest is clear. She is committed to requalifying the vast repertoire of her pictorial representations and elevating them to a level of formal values. Although the use of images drawn from mass media is evident and undeniable, it is not the essential core of her poetics. It is rather one of the implications of a fresh and attentive gaze cast upon the world. Claudia’s encounter with her surroundings, with the reality around her, with models of ordinary experience, and with the projection of artificial images constitutes, on the aesthetic level, a meaningful meeting between the artist and her world.