"Under its skies heavy with pale clouds, Africa is not that dark. And when the Harmattan blows, it covers landscapes, beasts and people with a mist of fine dust, blurring even the shadows cast by the trees, driving the colours hopeless. In the endless shimmering of dry grass emerge, here and there, like skeletons of elephants struck down too soon on their way to the graveyard, baobabs, their powerful tusks intertwined, giant ficus and dishevelled calabash trees."
- Maxime Préaud, Senior Curator,
Département des estampes,
Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
Muses, ordinary goddesses, insolent and modest, these portraits are a tribute to their brilliance and grace.
"An avalanche of small lines weaved, with passion and love, a kind of lace, (...) its grass, its knotted roots that never end, inviting us in a maze of dead ends, creating a magnificently rich landscape, that guards its secrets, its scents, letting us discover a world, (a rare event nowadays), through the art of drawing."
- Vladimir Velickovic, May 2002
It is difficult to imagine an artist that positions herself as nature's interface. Margherita is precisely that. Her relationship with trees is interactive. Her painting is the "marriage between the support and the subject". Indeed, even the materials she uses are pieces of nature. Her support is not a wood tablet or the traditional canvas, but a rough and heavy cardboard that she makes herself, by macerating bark and plant fibres. Her technique is a mixture of skill and antique craftsmanship. Her colours, or better yet, the different tonalities of her inks, yellow-ochre-brown-green, are the seasonal chromatic variations of the flora.
Dreams and abstract-gestural are two aspects of her painting that remain deeply rooted and so ramified in reality. But the reason for this apparent contradiction, the artist explains it herself. "Indeed, dreams are just that: fragments of reality that mix and find a new kind of coherence in the dream."
- "Encounters and apparitions" by Francesco Negri Arnoldi
Dean of the Faculty of History of Art University of Rome
