Biography
Short cv
Luciana Maini was born in Comacchio, in the province of Ferrara, in 1973. She graduated from the Institute of Art for the Mosaic of Ravenna in 1993 and continuing the studies at the Dams (Art) of Bologna. She obtained a specializes in the Restoration of Cultural Heritage, Frescoes and Icons on Wood.
In 2010, after an interesting teaching experience at the Damascus Archaeological Museum,
She decided to resume pictorial activity (indeed never totally abandoned) to express the light and color suggestions which she has obtained during the Syrian experience.
In 2012 she holds an degree in Cultural Heritage Conservation in Ravenna.
Today Luciana Maini continues her activity as a restorer and, above all, as a artist, also participating in many exhibitions, both in Italy and abroad.
Style
The encounter with mosaic and the restoration of mosaic works, which took place between 1992 and 1993 at the Art Institute of Ravenna, defines Luciana Maini's artistic and working modus, both culturally and ethically. The suggestions and vibrations transmitted by ancient mosaics and the explosive creativity of contemporary ones emerge, to this day, in many of the artist's works who, despite having later preferred a pictorial language, retains, in his works, the influences aesthetics absorbed in the ancient capital of the Byzantine exarchate.
From membership card to pointillism
In 2010, as part of a cultural and artistic collaboration project between Italy and Syria, Luciana Maini went to Damascus to teach iconography and icon restoration to a group of Syrian restorers at the city's Archaeological Museum. After this experience, Luciana Maini decides to propose again the suggestions and coloristic sensations absorbed there, with a technique different from those previously experimented: pointillism.
After carefully studying the theory of color, underlying the works of the Impressionists, and the techniques of Seurat, Previati and Segantini, Maini decides to "replace" the tile with the "dot". In her subsequent works (2010), the subject becomes totally secondary to a technique that involves the editing of images through the use of actual "dots" of color.
In Luciana Maini's artistic vision, therefore, the surrounding reality becomes fragmented; objects, people, animals are transitory figures that wait to disintegrate and recompose ad infinitum as if to represent the eternal clash between Apollonian and Dionysian, between Order and Disorder, between Chaos and Form. The user, approaching the work, realizes that what he had perceived as united is in truth disjointed, divided, atomised; every tiny particle, every single dot becomes a discrete unit, an autonomous entity, ready to take on any image and form.
Luciana Maini's works are therefore an invitation to criticism, a provocation to go beyond appearances. A dangerous challenge, indeed, since, as Oscar Wilde wrote:
“Those who descend below the surface do so at their own risk.”