… The art of Antonella Masetti Lucarella (since here we are talking about a real artist, and this does not happen easily nor frequently) looks to me as essentially consisting of grasping the basic, secret, silent layer of things, identified, ab origine, with the Void. …
… Life is there, behind the curtain. Its very few laws are there, behind the curtain. Of course we can deceive ourselves into believing to be able to bypass either or both of them. This is what almost all of us do almost always: paying a price. Because distance from the curtain and, even more so, from life, is very similar to the famous gate of Buñuel's Exterminator Angel. It cannot be crossed. Almost never. Not never. In fact, when somebody reaches the no man's land, we can perceive it. We know he is alone, that observing the truth can be extremely attractive, though extremely difficult. We know it may happen maybe only in this mysterious experience men call art. …
… Defying eyes. Receptive eyes. Possessing and greedy eyes. Nature eyes, nature with its laws for the preservation of the specie. Nobody can tell why lust works this way and only this way, just as nobody can say why stars exist. This is the face of truth, beyond the curtain. This is the truth discovered and revealed by Antonella Masetti Lucarella. …
Flavio Caroli, 1995
… I believe we should reasonably start from the black, from its physical, symbolic features, despite the uncertainty, at least for now, about whether this is light or substance - or place, space, stage; in any case an essential element for the apparition. …
… dispersed fragments, hands, eyes, broken profiles, shaded faces, a breast, a pubis. Notes, quotations, as in the pages of some recovered codex, all this rendered through the transparence, consumption in the mastery of a lovingly sketched drawing, accurate and tender. A drawing reaffirming, not only from a technical standpoint, a nostalgia for the body, emerging or maybe on the verge of disappearance, but refusing to give up its testimony. …
… Visible, readable statements don't
prevail - when words are isolated and evident, concepts risk to be limited
to captions; space is defined by the strategy of the writing signs in their
complexity: interfering with the strokes of the drawing, gaining expression
equality, becoming an undifferentiated substance, where the immediately recognizable
data continuously bounce back. Signs become mediators just like black color
(some fragments, or even better, ligaments of the black still remain here
and there) overcoming the full-empty, internal-external distinctions.
Color too contributes; it highlights, dissolves, enriches, becomes part of
the system of ambiguities, featuring chiaroscuro in all its possible facets
- originating the multiple, elusive and therefore evocative indications created
by this style of painting. …
Roberto Sanesi, 1998
… Seduction, as we were saying. Antonella Masetti Lucarella's characters seem almost consecrated to this purpose: sacrificial victims, we may suggest, where sacrifice is a conscious and redeeming act. Faces and looks are the "clefs" used. Mainly female faces and looks continuously informing or inquiring, suggesting, requesting. At times… they carve a representation space-time: and we are left observing their stillness to interpret their sounds, an abstract-concrete task. …
… The faces become interpretation
crossroads between formal "need" and musicality, because of a constantly
invoked seduction rigor, continuously solved with poses, entrapments, "canvas
plots", languid postures, with the balsamic innocence of "nudes"
and with all the proud characters the artist juxtaposes along its stage (which
is mysteriously able to become our own).
The continuous reference to the double is, of course, a reflecting surface,
but also, and mysteriously again, the absence of both. …
Giorgio Chiappini, 1995
… Her women are immersed in an every day’s life,
a life of today, a life in the present; there is no trite and empty sentimentalism
in them, but pulsating emotions: they suffer, laugh, participate, fight.
These women, whose part of Antonella’s entire production is offered
and dedicated, are warriors mantled in sweetness; at times there is complicity
in them, and yet challenge, self-consciousness and awareness of the power
they possess; they do not easily submit to anything but to that or those they
decide to belong to. It is a question of choice, of free will …. never
of imposition..…
… Moreover, her fil rouge unravels and rather recalls the introspective
painting of the Italian early twentieth-century, where the characters, instead
of being in search of an author like in Pirandello, were by then looking with
Donghi into their own interior existence.
of difficult interpretation like all the great representation of the past,
hiding, between the lines, messages comprehensible only to few elected people
against a false and apparent intelligibility of the scene.
Cynthia Penna, 2011
… It is a painting genre without space/time references
and, therefore, very relevant to any place where stands a woman in her double
aspect: one expressed by the protagonism of the colour Red, since ever symbol
of Maternity, and one by the driving power of the colour Black, since ever
symbol of Seduction.
The colour Brown is the Earth, also female, the Great Mother.
Thus, a painting genre that takes us back to the origins, the true ones, without
overstructures introduced by males, without War, without Politics, without
Finance.
Antonella Masetti Lucarella takes us back to all of this with her painting,
which is Art, that is Artifice, created with the knowledge of means and tools,
without improvisation, without communicative amateurism, as a true Artist.
…
Giancarlo Graziani, 2011
… Even if some details inevitably
and intentionally evoke the great past of Renaissance, the women of Masetti
Lucarella are women of the twenty-first century: this is evident in their
contemporary attitude and self-awareness, not to mention the impudence of
their gazes that suggest challenge rather than submission.
Her canvases bear witness to the passionate side of life; the warm and soft
colors they are imbued with represent the distinctive sign of the artist:
that of a sensuality which to her represents a fundamental expression of passion
and of life.
The essential and indispensable element of her canvases is Eros; it is that
intangible something which sets the pace and directs the action, both that
of the artist as she wields her brush, and the metaphorical one of her subjects.
Eros, pure eroticism, is the only element, the real foundation which in the
final analysis proves victorious. …
Cynthia Penna, 2017