Acque and Mud: Stratification as a Metaphor of Time (Maria Morganti)

Venice and its Lagoon are a historicised ecosystem in which human action has, over time, produced a stratification of cultural and natural information. As a sedimentation of matter and time, mud is at the basis of the work by the Venetian (albeit Milan-born) artist Maria Morganti, for whom it becomes a metaphor for painting, or rather, for a non-colour that in fact contains all the colours she uses. If compared with her paintings, in particular the ones entitled "Sedimentations", the pictures of the Acque – the title Morganti gave to her photographic series – show the affinity between the recording of a natural phenomenon and the representation of one’s own being-in-the-world. For both are time-dependent. In her apparently abstract and monochrome paintings, the artist offers a glimpse of the stratification of colour in the upper part of the canvas – she paints with only one colour a day, superimposing several layers on the same surface – which resembles the strips of sediment that water produces, with its rising and falling, on the wall of the Fondamenta.