Dr. Anne Paolucci’s Essay on Sirena

 

For Antonia Mastrocristina Sirena, painting is a natural extension of her skills as a singer and a poet. Art, for this extraordinary creative woman, is a totality of all possible media of human expression, the multiple facets of which are reflected in any one medium at a time. Acclaimed as a singer in her youth, always a poet in her response to life (as well as a poet in occasional spurts of writing), it is Sirena's paintings that command our attention.  

 

There is no doubt that Sirena's paintings are what they are, to a great extent, because of her training in music and poetry. She insists on providing a message for each painting (although one is not needed), and that message is always one of live and Dantesque unity.

 

Many of the titles of her works reflect her operatic training, but again - one need not and should not insist on the titles to appreciate what the painting is telling us directly, through its own special medium. 

 

Most interesting about this artist is the combination of high inspiration ("Trans-Expressionism" is the phrase she chooses to describe her work) and the easy, even rudimentary manner in which she approaches her craft -- a single bare bulb over a large table on which she paints: a plain kitchen knife for spreading colors; a lack of preliminary sketches. 

 

One might well call her work a "happening."  But what would be for most artists a clever primitive effort at painting is, for Sirena, breath-taking art.

 

She works for incredible long periods of time without a break -- 15 to 17 hours is not unusual -- often finishing a painting in one large sweep. "But you can't work that long without a break," someone will tell her. "For me, it's the only way," she answers. "I must paint.  If I don't I can't breathe." She means it. 

 

She paints when the spirit moves her and I suspect there is nothing else that moves her quite in the same way.  "I don't need much light," she explains, pointing to the small-watt bulb that hangs directly over the huge oak table on which she works in her basement. "I have all the light I need inside me. The colors come from my soul."

 

By any other name, Sirena's "Trans-Expressionism" would still affect us as a genial art form that has acquired the strong personal stamp of its originator. 

 

All art is personal, of course -- the style is the artist -- and Sirena's "Trans-Expressionism" is no exception.  But the name, finally, is not the only key to the effect she produces -- an outpouring of huge forces struggling toward light.  Even in her deceptively simple flower arrangements -- the dazzling array of colors bursting in pyrotechnic symmetry - one senses chaos coming to terms with form. 

 

Whatever Sirena calls her inspiration or vision, whatever titles she gives her painting, the ultimate effect goes far beyond the limited suggestion of nomenclature.  Her success lies in the perfect adequacy of vision and execution, form and matter.  How she has mastered her particular and totally individual technique is of less interest, finally, than the actual result, which is much larger in its suggestivity than all the things that have gone into it.

 

"Trans-Expressionism" could be used just as easily as "Trance-Expressionism" to describe Sirena's masterful handling, though color, of a multi-sensory experience, an emotional restructuring of consciousness seen through superimpositions of color, layers on layers of paint which is also sound, speech, song, music, spiritual and religious commitment. 

 

The artist's titles for her works are no more than a convenient shorthand for a complex experience in which inspiration flows directly into execution and refracted light becomes almost an audible sensation. Sirena has already proven her talent and has received scores of prestigious awards here and abroad.  I will simply note that anyone who, like myself, comes upon her work for the first time, must surely feel the excitement of aesthetic identification.  And even when one moves to larger statements of critical sensibility, the first sense of discovery will continue as a recurring magic.

 

What marks her work is a flow and a rhythm which makes one think immediately of song and message, haunting melody and lyric.  Of course, one notices immediately and perhaps first of all the craft itself: the solid table-like wood panels she prefers to paint on (instead of canvas), the use of ordinary kitchen knives to apply paint (creating the unique three-dimensional look of most of her mature work), the rich use of gold leaf. 

 

One is immediately struck, also, by the linear configurations  - often symmetrical arrangements that suggest a burst of light through a perfect prism of color, curving figures tending toward a nucleus of life, movement caught in its very flux.  The "representational" figures (they are not "realistic" in the usual sense, however) all bend into the gravitational pull of love -- especially the variety of "mother and child" tableaus in which deft but simple logistics of form reduce everything to simplest most limpid configuration.

 

Anne A. Paolucci

Award-winning playwright and poet