Poised between painting and photography, the works of Patrizia Mussa bring the photographic medium and the technique of hand coloring back to a timeless dimension. The meticulous doing and the technique of hand coloring to a timeless dimension, the meticulous filling of the spaces printed with very delicate shades of pastel colors, instill in the viewer an estrangement that determines in his observation a detachment from the present to bring the artifact back into a temporal and unreal sphere.

The reproducibility of the photographic medium is denied in its multiplicity in these works in which the artist intervenes by making each specimen a unicum impossible to replicate. The photographic negatives, printed on watercolor paper of precious Hahnemhule cotton, expand the temporal context, referring to illuminated manuscripts, incunabula, precious parchments, Turner and Venetian landscape painters. Optical room, dark room or operating room? The artist uses pastels as sharp scalpels that leave imperceptible marks on the paper, determining atmospheric shades and glacial reflections.

And yet, it is still photography that dictates its laws of rigor and coldness, of informative punctuality and microscopic obsessiveness in detail. “Post litteram” landscape painter, Patrizia Mussa evokes, without abandoning herself to it, the dimension of Carthusian calmness, of the meticulous doing of an embroiderer, of industrious patience and of the importance, all in all partial, of time. The search for a time antithetical to the present, fast and schizophrenic in which it is evident how, in the face of his works, crystallized time can be read in all its immanent poeticity.