Silence and solitude in Leonor Botteri's painting

Abstract

When we approach Leonor Botteri's paintings, we enter a world that doesn't reveal itself immediately, a world that asks and disturbs us. It is a language that emerges from silence, ascetic, images that speak of waiting, of foreboding. This essay searches for the mystery that is gestated in the intertwining of concentration and dispersion, a work that is never finished, that is ajar, installed on the threshold of being, revealing deeper truths, woven from intimacy, metaphysics. His still lifes are silent, there are no screams, but whispers, articulate and inarticulate sounds. The self-portraits are a conversation with intimacy, a genre very appropriate for a modest soul who doesn't feel at ease in action. Botteri describes eyes that have lost the desire to look. There is something of abandonment, lassitude, tiredness or boredom in the eyes of the artist's characters. It's close to De Chirico. In both, the figures are made of silence, solitude, isolation, abandonment, shadows of existence. Inhuman, strange, almost mannequins, abandoned in deserted atmospheres conducive to enigmas. Or the desolation of Hopper's nostalgic figures. In the indifference painted by Leonor Botteri, one is not indifferent.