Miriam Elliot’s “time machines”

The paintings by Miriam Elliot are always projecting us into a space and a time “others”, distant from here and now. If we follow their lines and whirls, which seem the track left in the sky by a small aircraft strained to stunt flying, we see them rearing up and then letting themselves fall into the empty space, drawing spirals, going daringly, breathlessly, to the conquest of the space summit, and we feel carried into a visionary world, where only some fragment, here and there showing up, stays to indicate us a possible link with the real. The paintings by Miriam are the transfiguration of her experiences and memories, feelings and dreams. Many of her works, as evidenced by the titles themselves, recall a happy time, the one of childhood, which seemed forever lost but now come to life again in icons, symbols, color layers and glows, in surfaces where the breath of the sign and of the color stretches, alternating with concentrations of lines soon shattered and with luminous, throbbing glows.

Miriam Elliot’s pictorial vocabulary is linked to the tradition of South American painting, which has had an unmarginal influence, in the last century, on the European and North American painting experiences. Let’s think, just to limit ourseleves to an only, emblematic name, of Joaquín Torres García (1874 - 1949), the Uruguayan artist who lived for a long time in New York, Paris, Barcelona and Madrid, before going back to his country in the mid-Thirties. Here are, then, this continuous counterpoint of signs intersecting, marching side by side, placing one above the other, free in their course or constrained into sinuous geometries or with a restless route, as when Miriam draws forms which seem to allude to calcareous skeletons, to the backbone, to a rail, to the body of a viper, to a a spider’s web placing itsel above a desolate landscape in the background. There are, in all of these paintings, a vital fit, a disruptive energy, an expressive strength which fascinate. And there are, well-defined, some reminiscences of Futurism, since Miriam Elliot’s works seem to re-propose some of the elements which characterized that experience: that new wind of the modern modifying the perception of space and time, and the irruption of new chances of communication, beyond “here and now”. Miriam’s spirals and whirls seem to alternatively carry us into a past and future time: they are, on the one hand, visions linked to those “time machines” that man has always dreamed to build, in order to explore what is elsewhere from the place and time boundaries in which his existence is compelled to unravel itself. The color section of the catalogue reproduces a selection of paintings by the artist, realized in the last two years, in her atelier in Reggio Emilia.

In Miriam Elliot’s artistic track, special importance have the scenographical works, concerning both the paintings, acting as wings in the show and the costumes, which she personally paints one by one on different kinds of fabric. Particularly suggestive has been Miriam’s most recent work in this field: the scenography of the ballet “Tango”, performed for the first time on May 30th, 2010, in the Saloon of the Matilde di Canossa Resort in San Bartolomeo (Reggio Emilia) – on the occasion, about twenty paintings by the artist, made in the last years, had been exhibited in the adjoining restaurant and hall of the hotel. Thanks to Miriam Elliot’s scenography and to the coreography conceived by Paolo Nocera – interpreter, together with Daniele Nocera, Alejandro Mauricio Astudillo Cordova, Lourdes Daniela Garrone of the ballet –, the work becomes a poetical, yearning exploration of that form of art, melting music, dance, song text, coming into life in the region of the Rio de la Plata (Uruguay and Argentina) and which would then seduce the whole world. As said by Enrique Santos Discépolo, “Tango is a sad thought being danced”: in this deep essence of tango, and in the so intense relation that this dance immediately establishes between the two bodies drawing close in the tango-steps, lies the secret of the persistent success of tango.

The color section of this catalogue reproduces the eleven paintings which formed a ring round the movements of the ballet: in them, through the unmistakable lines and colors of her painting, Miriam Elliot recalls the birth and development of tango, reminds us in the images some of its great heros (Carlos Gardel) and anyway in the names, accurately written, all those who gave their contribution to this form of art, outcome of a sort of melting pot of musical traditions and life experiences of people from different places.

Sandro Parmiggiani