RAFFAELLA TORRESAN
A Gathering
WINDOWSPACE
July 2019
(Detail) cold cold day, (2010)
Raffaella
Torresan has paint in her blood. Images are what she breathes.
‘I can’t
put a stop to work I love’ is her refrain.
‘Raffaella
Torresan is always working. This is the most important fact about Raff and her
art practice’ writes Maurice McNamarah.*
Torresan
is something of a Renaissance woman, a painter who also writes, poetry and
prose, has had an affair with photography, and loves to thrash out ideas in
tangential ways among friends, which has led to her organization of many
occasions for sharing, visual and verbal. All she lacks is the classic salon, but being a gregarious
Italian-Australian, and tenacious, she finds ways and places to spread the
enthusiasm and conversation. Taking over the VAS (Victorian Artists’ Society)
is pretty much an annual event. Pubs suit poetry readings.
Torresan’s
life has not been all ‘smooth sailing’ however and the bumpier parts and their
origin are the subject of her latest book – La
Ragazza (2018).
To try
and put a perspective on her abundance of enthusiasms and talents it was
helpful to ask the question: Who are your visual favourites. In this writer’s
head, first came Raoul Dufy – a guess not far from the mark, although
Torresan’s first- named was a surprise: Francis Bacon. Then came Redon, Francesco
Clemente, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cezanne and then, with triumph, Lucien Freud. Torresan’s world is
wide and her visual lexicon fed by travel. Unafraid to paint on the streets,
it’s hard to imagine how she finds her way home with so many canvases!
Torresan’s
affection for ‘the work she loves’ is there in her outpouring of images. She has
an insatiable hunger to conjure what she sees and experiences.
In honour
of her abundance WINDOWSPACE will
access a second window to fill with paintings and brighten mid-winter.
See more
of Torresan’s achievements at: http://www.raffaellatorresan.com/index.html
AS
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