.

 

 

Probably there is not greater sadness than the longing for a past and happy time. As for the impossibility to go back there. The memories of the life and joy experiences in a current time, which shows tortuous and difficult, can pierce the soul. Therefore, there is nothing sadder than a happy past time. And nothing more harmful than a nostalgic feeling.

 

Virginia Rota works with a correct sensibility, typical from those ones who understand and experiment this feeling. Her work combines literature, photography and painting to express that primary feeling, that sausade so ambiguous and complex through portraits of unknown people who, in some way, they fuse together and shape an imposing intimate portrait.

 

Saudade is a complete and round work because it is transverse, because it is not limited to the possibilities that photography provides and because joins the virtues that the literature and the painting offer. Almost gradually, intricately, one discipline makes way to other, not only to enrich the message, but also to make it more profound, more private, more perfect.

 

The first level is composed of photography, because it is the technique and the support. It is sober, elegant, without distractions that distance the viewer from the important message and confronting him directly with it. It is impossible not associate the introspective nature of her work with authors like Bill Henson, with his heavy and moving atmospheres, like a restrained storm at the right time to start to rain. This containment, so palpable in Saudade, is almost painful, like the acceptance of something, which we would not like to accept. However, the reality with its habitual coldness, forces to do it.

 

The second of the levels is the pictorial one. You cannot notice only the portraitist legacy of the oil painting or the psychologist personality of the characters, but also certain echoes of the reigning solitude of Hopper’s works, or of the inseparable tenebrism of the work of Caravaggio. Everything is very soft, restrained, and motionless. It is like pity, like melancholy gripping stealthily without realizing. They are characters who are absolute protagonists of the work, who are confronted with neutral and opaque backgrounds, like metaphors of the loss and the void, like in a state of permanent wait for a better time which never will come back. Maybe the most terrible is the certainty and raising awareness of that, where there is no possibility of exemption and where the option of getting rid of that is denied.