Maria Novella Del Signore: Sensitive Continuum.
Bruno Corà, 2002

One of the qualities that I prefer in art is the opposition to conformity when it expresses a personal inclination which cannot be traced to a common way of feeling. So an artist interests me exactly for the particular way in which he renders concrete his more or less rational intuitions or obsessions. Sometimes these pervade his mind for years, even when the reality surrounding him reverberates with aspects different from and opposed to his own. The faith (or one could say, the tenacity) with which Maria Novella Del Signore has constructed, over the last twenty years, the paradigm of her artwork is a unique example of the constancy of her own interior dimension of sensitivity as she perceives it. Having observed her work starting with the pieces dating to the early Eighties when she rendered transparencies with painterly plastic values, using hanging veils that weresusceptible to movement in the slightest breath of air; down to her works in glass and ceramics, I can say that her degree of rooted sensitivity has remained high and unchanged. Her Attese (Expectations, 1980) functioned as relational devices that welcomed the observer-visitor into their spaces, making him the true motor-spark for their life; the Fields phase 1 (1996) , frosted glassy bodies which nevertheless cast reflections, transparencies and shadows on fields that recall lunar landscapes; the extra fine ceramics of Annliviaplurabella and the glass threads of Homes (2000); these are all emblematic of a will to break the object-oriented status of much contemporary art in order to achieve the opposite: a quality of the artwork which is ever more a catalyst of our most sensitive faculties in a time that requires freeing oneself of superfluous cares.