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Only as the termination and in the maturation of a lifelong research is it possible, in concluding an uninterrupted climb, to touch the territories that go well beyond any boundary, and so give rise and set the time of transmutation. This is the true reality of Luisa Romano who has stopped in the heavens the course of time and in the period lived evokes the infinite memory of existence.

When, after some years gone by, I was looking at her more recent pictures the strongest emotion I  experienced was given by my recalling a never-expressed  concept in Plato’s literary piece  “Fedro”, when Socrates states that communication is “golden” ; that is, more through the “ears” and through spoken communication than through writing: writing defines what the speech suggests and what it forms within us, as a deep  down memory and as a sign of the presence of the soul.

Painting to Luisa Romano is always  “alchemy”, a blend which allows the “unimaginable” to rise up and come about, that particular degree, as symbolized  by Corbini and by Hillman, of perception and experience of impressions that history has in every way attempted to bar from emerging.

Result of that reflection that Jung has clearly and definitely explained in its function: “The richness of the human mind and its essential fundamental feature are probably determined by this reflective state. Reflection triggers off once more the process of excitation which transforms the stimulus into a series of images which, in the impetus is strong enough, are then reproduced in a form of expression”.

The unconscious is structured as language, as Lacan asserts, that is with “images” ; and according to Hillman’s psychology “visibility” is the recomposing in experience, and hence in life, all that has become visible in the reality which forms the pattern of the structure and where “emotion” and “instinct” are revelations.

The “Ermetismo” of Luisa Romano lies in the fact of perceiving this particular resemblance, and not only between microcosm (and we are a microcosm), boundless and one, and macrocosm, but also between the nature “within us” and the nature “outside us” that will have to form its own structure. Painting is reproducing  the unit as such into a pattern but it is also a process of “ascending” from a three-dimensional space into a space having more than three dimensions. It no longer acts on the object we would like to make invisible, steering it beyond the human eye’s ability to see.

A body (and its image) is actually three-dimensional in real space; nothing however, can prevent us from “imagining” it immersed within a space of more than three dimensions; the human body would thus become invisible. The force of painting lies in perceiving  this and expressing it in such a way that the heart is touched and aroused by something that has not yet been fully understood nor then subsequently  defined by science. It is the eyes (and the eye as such has held an important role in Luisa Romano’s research) that look at the conscious world, but which look also inside the being, the existence, appearing so to lie well beyond the conscious world itself.

Like Plato, Luisa Romano plays on the episodes of life (either already symbols or mere archetypes); moving from the most elementary of all mysteries, the act of coming to life and the act of dying, and most of all consideration of that process of “defining”, granted to man alone and that only man can undertake, detecting his destiny either on the verge towards or at the threshold of the Abyss of the gnostic Gospels, which precedes all genesis requiring any type of creation and that today appears as a never-ending shadow going beyond the knowledge of all science and perhaps being its ultimate truth.

The womb-cavern; the female body-cave emerging  from behind the more remote forms  of art. The major signs of Paleolithic art are generally to be found in caves. Caves probably represented something of mistery, the privileged sites where communication with the supernatural forces could be effected. The front part (the one receiving the sunlight) was used for social activities while the innermost part, the dark unlit area, was the sit for rites. A square sky (Adam’s home, the walls which bring shelter) follows the point and the space in which the fragment unfolds the segment of Existence which is every life; but in that segment, it expresses the fullness of the horizon.

The light-blue square, like the Madonna’s veil, the sky as a unit in the whole cosmos of whose endless diameter we in any case are still part of, does in fact form the dimension, the pattern which in the game of “synchrony” links the nature “within us” to the nature “outside us”.

It is an alchemy function that occurs in painting, as the achievement and confirmation of the “imaginative”, the level reached by perception and experience of the image impressions inside which the soul lives. The denied access is once again opened to us and we once more end up possessing a soul.

By Elio Mercuri

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