I met Letizia who was a girl and I was in my early teens.
She and my cousin Pino lived in a house that was a little bit of a farm, a little bit of a matter factory but mostly a dream factory. I often stayed with them, Pino and I experimented with music and she painted. Inside the house was the smell of good food and colors.
There was one painting that I liked more than the others, I don’t know why but I remember picturing it in my head when I came home, I liked the colors, the yellow and gray and that precarious balance of shapes that seemed to blend quickly when you turned around, only to reassemble, still, but never the same, as soon as you went back to look at them.
When I used to enter their house, from the entrance, to the right, behind a partition was hanging the painting and you had to lean out a little bit to look at it, that was the first thing I used to do.
I used to tell Letizia from time to time that I liked it, but not that I was almost obsessed with that painting. Then one day, when I was about to leave, she took the painting and after wrapping it with brown wrapping paper, she gave it to me! Since that day, the painting has followed me on every move, and to this day I still get excited looking at it because of its beauty and the memories it evokes.
Although my point of view is very personal and impossible to separate from the personal events that bind me to Letizia, as a person of my intimate family, I think her work can be looked at behind the veil of this personal point of view of mine.
Her ability to interpret human feeling and to live it fully, her skill in manipulating all forms of matter make her an artist in a total sense, her every gesture is practiced as the result of her intense living.
In his works, of whatever workmanship or technique, even when one is seemingly transported to distant dimensions, one always finds the profound sense of physicality, understood as the only way to traverse the world.
Dear friend, we have known each other forever, we were young girls, I have always positively envied you.
Art is light for the heart and for the eyes, when I lay mine on your works, from the smallest that can be a piece of jewelry to the most grade, it warms my heart and I think that I was lucky to have you for a friend and to have been your client, even for the many things and the many moments of emotions and pain that we have experienced together.
I met Letizia Borelli several years ago, initially outside of her artistic and professional context, having met her with other friends during one of my firefighting seasons in Calabria.
We liked each other immediately, “by the skin of our teeth,” not only because of our shared passion for flying, but probably because we had mutually identified common characteristics such as sincerity, passion, and a sense of humanity.
So a friendship was immediately born, which, at the end of the season, turned into an invitation to visit his Art Center in Sabina. I cannot describe the feelings I had when, after the last soft curves of the old Salaria, past Nerola, I found myself in front of the complex that houses his multifaceted activities.
Crossing the small wooden bridge over a bubbling stream, one descends into the world of Letizia, a magical world made up of all kinds of artistic production. In the spacious rooms of the complex, everywhere there are paintings, bas-reliefs, everyday objects such as lamps and other special pieces of furniture. Then again ceramics, sculptures and jewelry. There is no shortage of workshops, with respect to which Letizia is always lavish with much-appreciated explanations.
I know that the Center’s doors are always open for friends, admirers and those interested in art in any capacity, so I recommend those who are not yet familiar with Letizia Borelli’s art to make contact with her, to let yourself slip into a journey of shapes and colors, an experience that is sure to be of great sensory intensity.
The images reproposed in Letizia Borelli’s work “ESTASI,” if even in the simplicity of the subject, take on forms and colors of a totalizing Nature in which every single element in addition to being itself, also becomes something else to the eye of the observer.
Then the meadow is also sea, compared to the woman (flower, cloud and shell) as if immersed in a liquid, but it is also sand compared to the sky that laps it, while giant daisies as slender as the threads of life, rise straight and solemn toward a colorless sky.
Through this work, the author seems to re-propose a solar perception of nature, a kind of imaginative transposition of her being in the feminine, then each element albeit in its simplicity, becomes part of a whole, in which the intrapsychic dimension of the author is substantiated in the symbolic polychromy of the work.
The very fact that the work was chosen as the cover of a novel with references to D’Annunzio’s work attests to the author’s rare ability to have been able to combine the intrapsychic dimension with the aesthetic-descriptive dimension in her images.
On the cover: Letizia Borelli, “Ecstasy” (oil painting on canvas and metal on canvas approx. 190×130 cm – 2010)
Letizia Borelli is an eclectic artist that is, she reveals skills in different fields; from painting to sculpture, from glasswork to woodwork, from jewelry making to furniture designer.
I had the opportunity and pleasure of getting to know her: a woman with an uncommon life, a lover of her work, her creations and endowed with an extraordinary sensitivity and humanity that make her unique.
I am proud to have been one of the first clients of her Morena’s Rome Show. I have in my home works expertly made by her hands, conceived by her brain and curated with all her love. Each work reflects her personality.
Thank you Letizia…I will never forget you, for the artist, the woman, the friend that you are and for your sweetness and your smile…I will leave to posterity a priceless value of uniqueness and beauty.
The art of the true artist vibrates with its own force, cannot hide it, cannot contain it, is blazing like underground magma that expands and sometimes erupts without time or space in the minds of those who perceive it and have the sensitivity to share it with its creator.
The true artist sits in conviviality with Being and thus seeks a place that reflects his or her own intimate source, that lets instincts and creativity run free, a place where nature acts as a corollary to the creations and where the works are ataraxically neutral from the conditioning of doxa, the commonplaces from the daily rush, the metropolitan chaos.
It is not true that the artist must suffer in order to produce good works. art should not express pathology, suffering, schizophrenia but joy, positivity, vital energy, all manifestations of spirit, expressive freedom and pleasure.
This school, this art studio, these workshops where metals are forged, glass is melted, woods and stones are carved, cultures and thoughts for the future are shaped, are located in Italy, in a place full of history and mysticism, in the valleys beloved by St. Francis on his journey to Rome. These are unique places where Nature sings her own melody, where animals live wild. Each sound brings calm and well-being back inside, remembering and strengthening the humanity lost in each of us. The purpose of the teaching is to create a crystalline spring, uncontainable, overflowing from minds, breaking the dams of stereotype, purifying and restoring psychic ecology, clearing neurons like pebbles in a river after the flood, polished and smooth in the transparency that contains and shakes them on the long journey to the oceans.
This is the story of Letizia Borelli.
At this point, why would I have my house or furniture made by Letizia Borelli? The study of the human, her top priority, has led her to learn about the mental and aesthetic structures of cultural paradigms and unrepeatably suited for each entity. Environments, colors, and forms mirror one’s personality.
I deliberately leave out the various degrees, diplomas, certificates and courses in Italy and around the world, with the greatest living artists and architects. She is not a theorist; she works with her hands, on many materials. In her twenties she was making stone walls with craftsmen from Umbria and Lazio. Rare are on this planet people with her practical and theoretical experience.
Letizia Borelli does not simply furnish your home, but she looks at you, listens to you, studies you as a good psychologist, and brings “your” home to life. Like a professional seamstress she sews your custom-made suit. She already sees the finished project where there is still rubble and knows how to make a shard of tile into a work of art.
Together with his team of professionals and artists, he puts his hand everywhere, from the floor to the furniture, mirrors, and chandeliers to the last curtain, managing to take advantage of every small insignificant space to create an elegant and indispensable environment. Thanks to Master Pino’s ingenious talent, marble takes artistic form and gives a unique and priceless value to your home.
Then if you have a board you want to throw away or a piece of old iron or a sheet of lead you don’t know what to do with, you give it to Diego and he makes you a shelf, a cabinet, a custom-made door, a chandelier, a hutch. In their forges or directly on site, this talented team knows how to add value to your home by transforming it into your magical realm. Just as the same car model can be made into various fittings, equally those who turn to this team buy a basic model home and end up with a super-luxurious flagship in their hands. Thanks to their talent for transforming low-value items into precious jewels, your investment will immediately pay off and-as Letizia once told us-“if you want to sell your house someday, the first interested person who walks in will immediately fall in love with it and do anything to get it.”
Be careful, though!
Your kitchen, your bed, your chandelier, your railing, your painting on the wall, your mirror, your sofa, your terrace, your chairs, your pantry–everything, it will be so much YOURS that you will hardly be able to do without it.
Sincerely
Dear Letizia,
we have known each other for many years, but it is only recently that I have entered into the heart of your artistic inspiration. When I first entered your magnificent studio, protected by a majestic poplar tree surely very old and wise, I stood in silence…amazed.
I was reminded of a tree named Yggdrasil, the tree of the Goddess Erda who feeds from a spring located in the center of the earth from which the water of wisdom gushes forth, as the Norse myth tells. The splendors, illuminated by the large windows of the studio, come to me speaking the very ancestral language of this Goddess: “From that place and those waters that lie under the tree, come three maidens of much wisdom” … firm and earthly and at the same time docile and flexible, just as you are, Letizia, and consequently your works. A thought passes quickly through me, “Here is the Feminine Soul.”
Your works are like invisible paths that open the way for the wayfarer, who has been traveling for millennia in search of the artistic inspiration of a feminine soul. Here you feel you have arrived at your destination. What immense wrong has been done to woman by taking away all possibility of intellectual expression. It is precisely through this creative vivacity of hers that we can know the things of the world as a function of life.
In your works, Letizia, there is all this force of life – feminine and masculine – and you feel how each question finds its optimal solution, a peculiar characteristic precisely of woman. Elements that merge with each other to become One, and like frothy waves defy all darkness returning after a long wandering path where everything is perfection.
Understand with joy that without the work of the feminine every paradise in the world is lost. It is the grace of life that spins like light in the soul, a feminine no longer shrouded in mystery but rising in round, icastic forms sprouting in the fertile and generous humus of a woman capable of making Art, and all your work is a living demonstration of this. Your Art, Letizia, comes like a caress of a cloud that is shaped into infinite forms and senses and fills you with bliss, while as a woman it stimulates you to launch yourself beyond the impossible of existence.
The mind quiets down and opens to hitherto unknown dimensions.
Thank you Letizia.
