Mirella La Rosa

The fundamental necessity when faced with the images of Mirella La Rosa is to draw a story from them. To understand from where these architectural fragments, similar to Venetian palaces but also so very different, come and to where they are going. It is a question of deciding whether that all enshrouding and all dominating element, water, is the factor sparking the destruction of a civilization or rather the amniotic fluid from which it will be born. Or, better still, born again, as if its physical reality were a dream and water needed to re-build structures with columns and window spaces lit from behind in orderly and infinite spaces. These are places, par excellence, which must, not without difficulty, resurface and regain authenticity.

For it would be a mistake to look only on the surface of Mirella La Rosa work; to admire her amazing ability to manipulate her images through the use of mythical computer programmes, for, looking deeper, one realises this is not quite the case. Special effects have been created but are not as determining as one would imagine (talking about story-telling, what comes immediately to mind is how little remains of visionariness in certain film-making) and are the Special effects possible even before the computer took over the job of producing them. Perhaps they will have become easier to elaborate giving Mirella the opportunity of assembling her ideas figuratively, retracing through her viewfinder stories which she herself knows already but which urgently need fixing in time.

Stories from mutable primordial elements such as light and water but also from elements just as primordial but solid and coming from the earth such as marble. The need to restore order from primeval chaos, to hypothesize a balance in chromatic backgrounds of light and shade and in matching combinations, which go beyond pure and simple beauty and to suggest journeys to seemingly well-known lands but which in truth are quite unexplored. For at the real root of Mirella′s work is that disturbing certain something which makes us both curious and apprehensive, obliging us to look beyond, to explore further even while leading us astray and denying us a sense of security. Mirella′s photographs are certainly fascinating, but they do not console, they oblige us to journey in reverse, to put ourselves at the beginning of the story, a story not gathered from facts but from emotions.