The Community of the Little Venuses

Meeting Laura Pellizzari is approaching the female metaphysical theater. Her sculpted women resemble, however, if we observe them, we can grasp the different degrees and nuances of femininity that make us swing like inside a metaphysical theater. A theater, an empirical-immanentist world; and it is precisely a metaphysical space and temporality that are modeled by the artist on earth. A time, conceived as a current, that runs through our present and crosses us aside: a material space that concretizes in nudity and repetition, and which causes, almost by echo, the opposite opening to the ” infinite in the intimate human … The absence of arms and feet, in fact, leaves us away from the man of action, by the agent; think of the great metaphysical walk by Alberto Giacometti; the woman without her arms and legs is the meditative being « par excellence »: the being of metaphysics and, at the same time, her object and her subject. Thanks to the Little Venuses Laura Pellizzari resumes and continues the question of femininity, started with the Accumulations, but this time femininity is rethought from the point of view of the essential, the archaic. Their aesthetics combines the impressive grace of modern femininity, which is perhaps characterized by madness, the amazement and the candor of the faces and hairs typical of ancient art. The feeling that the Little Venuses raises us is strong, for it is the sculpture itself that asks us something! To what extent are we interrogated? On anything we can say, because, looking directly into their eyes, they question us about ourselves. It is precisely in this dialogue that it is created, that makes us perceive and, most of all, discover the awesome assembly of our interiority. Since a single woman is not enough to establish a community, the Little Venuses, discuss in groups of two or three and evolve “in the immobility of terracotta”: if two women are the balance, harmony, three are harmony and perfection. (Segue  the community)… A classical perfection, which reconciles us to the present place of our ancestral dreams, where we meet the Thanksgiving and the timeliness of mythology. Laura presents them: Venus the grace of vegetation and gardens, Vesta the one of the house and the hearth, and finally Pallade the one of life and birth. According to the tradition, they are sisters, nude and dancing by the shoulders. In the spiritual theater of Laura, however, it is the thought of dancing on the carol of the carol, while the Thanks, sessions, talk about the transversal strength of woman in history, in society and in family … Ultimately it is the evanescence of a dialogic word that surrounds the group and provokes it, and is perhaps the source of that energy that surrounds us when we are in the presence of this community between earth and spirit. A community that has always been present in our intimacy. And yet, these young mobile-real women suggest that man never exists on his own, that the community begins with at least two individuals and that femininity exists in each of us.

Prof. Bruno Cany

Aesthetical Philosophy and Philosophical Anthropology
Paris 8 University, Vincennes – Saint Denis