Fiamma Morelli’s Otherworldly Abstractions

“The connotations are endless and provoke us to entertain ideas surrounding beauty, the sublime and ecstasy. “

 

Courtesy of the artist.

 

Fiamma Morelli’s artwork has a spiritual connotation.  In her most recent work at Broadway Gallery, NYC.  Flaming morning red is rushing ruthlessly through pristine scenery. With softly curved brushstrokes the artist constructs a sloping quasi-abstract landscape. A few lucid lines, rippling along the ridges, illuminate perilous red and gloomy crimson. Bright rays of white light rise from a soft, pink pond in the valley, cutting a hole in the scarlet sky. They vanish into a giant void. A divine lightning catches the eye of the spectator. This is the central area of the painting: the suggestion of something beyond the visible. Nevertheless, Morelli does not reveal the true meaning. It remains a suggestion of something that each one should behold for themselves. The translation is strictly personal. It is a personal quest for the not yet discovered.

A dark, orange glow in the air covers the mountains in shadow, like a curtain. The landscape is peaceful, quiet.   One immediately realizes that red is color of profound significance.  We sense heat, passion, intensity, and blood.  The connotations are endless and provoke us to entertain ideas surrounding beauty, the sublime and ecstasy. 

One of the foremost philosophers of the 19th century was Edmund Burke.  Edmund Burke referred to the sublime as a terror of unimaginable proportions.  He considered “terror as producing an unnatural tension and certain violent emotions of the nerves; it easily follows, from what we have just said, that whatever is fitted to produce such a tension must be productive of a passion similar to terror, and consequently must be a source of the sublime, though it should have no idea of danger connected with it.”

Courtesy of the artist.

Morelli creates work that is has an otherworldly beauty, conjuring the majestic, and unearthly.  This is an individual journey; the spectator is entering the world of the sublime.  Other western counterparts for Morelli are Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler. At just 23 years old, Helen Frankenthaler painted Mountains and Sea (1952), an abstraction that freed up the stalemate in postwar American art following the first exciting spark of creative activity by the Abstract Expressionists. It looks, in reproduction, like a peaceful evocative painting with a series of blue, green and red stains fading into pink – all of which hint at the landscape that the title suggests.  These color field painters illuminated our sense of light and nature and changed the face of painting.  Morelli keeps this torch alight.  She creates paintings where the space, location and environment look quiet and empty. Her work is elemental.  It conveys a rich passion, a described earthy-ness that is palpable.  It is a strength distributed by the earth and its elements and awarded to those who are willing to receive it. There is a strong energy that arises from the sharp colors. The artist creates light and significance through the idea of a realistic landscape that is in fact an abstract story of emotion and spiritual guidance.