The terms - the styles - Expressionism and Impressionism are not as opposed as we could at first think. In a similar way, we should no longer consider Abstract and Representational art so differing. Both aspects are self-evident in the work of Inmaculada Arricivita, That progresses within the limits of recognizability, close to shapelessness but without preventing us from the possibility of identifying landscapes, flowers, etc. She always imposes her expressive or fantastic side, although it might come from notes far related to nature, the same way as, for instance, are "Les Nymphéas" by Claude Monet. Her colouring, on the other hand, turns out intense, without fearing contrasts that even reach the complementary ones. Some of the "landscapes" are arranged in planes while "flowers" tend to fill all available spaces in other cases. Both themes are mainly based on a blot or dablike technique, a kind of tachisme, perhaps with a point of a relative chance under control. It is well known that the outcome then depends on the taste and preferences of the artist, that achieves a convincing, very pleasant and elegant visuality in this case.
Angel Azpeitia
President of the Spanish Art Critics Association
It was through the discovery of some distant shores of the continent of the feminine soul, that the painter Inmaculada Arricivita could achieve her personal touch that places her among the minority of those painters contributing to the opening of new ways in the polychromic trends in the History of Art. Colours do not stop moving before the eyes of the spectator. Their movement is like a cheerful music that makes the painting display atmospheric, botanical and mental figures in our minds, drawing infinite paintings of resembling landscapes thanks to the musicality of Inmaculada's unigue works. Two are the main styles we can find: that of creating bright, glowing, invented landscapes, and that of seeing the same in fragments and segments well accommodated on the loving bosom of a happy nature, and to tell the truth, the word happiness is the most important characteristic of her works; that happiness that fills the eyes of those receiving aesthetic pleasures, and that always follows such eyes particularly in their dreams and at the moments of contemplation. It is a mystical background the one staying behind the two styles and the one that engenders those spiritual pleasures born from this carnival of colours and pagan prayers.
Soliman El Attar
Cultural Advisor, Embassy of the Arab Republic of Egypt - Madrid
Director of the Egyptian Institute for Islamic Studies - Madrid
Doctor and Professor of al-Andalus Literature, Cairo University (Arab Republic of Egypt)
To wander among the silk paintings of Inmaculada Arricivita is like palying with a kaleidoscope: colours this way, forms and shapes that way and, at the slightest movement, colours burst into crystals of a thousand tones and the forms fade multiplying themselves in an ever changing panorama, without losing the potential of energy that they radiate. Pure fantasy!
María Antonia Estévez
Madrid correspondant of DIARIO DE NAVARRA, Pamplona
8 December 1996
Getting inside the paintings of Inmaculada Arricivita means diving into our unconscious, in the essential and unknown territory of our personality. Her pictorial technique enables to re-create her images, supreme merit of implicit resistance before the impoverishing equalization imposed by the all-embracing schemes of the commercial, political and religious discourse from today. The outstanding material of her work - the silk, with its reminiscences of elegance, exoticism and refinement - produces its own slides and textures, a symphony of bright colours,that favours the ethereal nature of her landscapes and thus their relativism and uncertainty, two of the so suitable characteristics that define nowadays' spirit.
Tomás Yerro Villanueva
General Director for Culture - Institución Príncipe de Viana
Autonomous Government of Navarra
The paintings on silk by Inmaculada Arricivita are a truly new work, different as much fo; its content as for the material, the means or the techniques. There is no geometry, no constructive rigidity. There are neither limits nor formal identity. Forms refuse to be forms, Neither can be noticed gestures nor established linear courses, but there is an obvious attractive visual support, imposing, different from what usually is presented by those entities that a frame defines and singles out. What is really amazing in the plastic contens, in the visual elements and what the mind acclaims in these paintings is the spectacularity produced by the colours on their mixing, their iridescences, transparencies and tonalities overflowing naturalness and spontaneity, where nothing is left over and nothing is missing, as if the effects they provoke were originated by physical, geological or chemical phenomena, and not by handmade procedures. What we can see, seems to me of an exceptional technical quality. It is really another altogether different way of understanding silk painting, about which nothing is said in any of the traditional methods available.
Jesús Solanas Donoso
Graduate in Arts
Senior geacher Painter and Engraver
It is not that often that we have the opportunity to contemplate such a so well-balanced exercise of originality and pictorial Mastery as the works of Inmaculada Arricivita. Her paintings offer a Wide variety of themes, from the colourful "explosion" to the "landscape" horizontality, clearly avoiding representational as such and at the same time enabling us to "see" or even better to "glimpse" flowers and landscapes, forms ans dreamlike shapes, where nothing is outlined but where everything can be imagined, and felt. As a whole, the work of Inmaculada Arricivita demonstrates vitality aplenty, a blossoming of spiritual energy displayed with an elegant chromatism, a balanced composition, an even relaxing diversity of spaces where to enjoy wandering without being rejected by whatever chromatic or formal unpleasantness; a work, in short, able to attract both the amateur and the connoisseur by its outstanding aesthetic sense.
Higinio Fernández Del Val
Art Critic
In days as these we are living, in which nobody any longer knows what IS TRUE in the world of plastic arts, Inmaculada Arricivita has developed an original pictorial work;she has come across a creational and no imitative painting, as beautiful as suggestive, personal and even surprising given the background of artistry that gravitates above and around it. Her technique, otherwise, innovative, has been good enough for her to make progress in a pictorial field as suggestive as plenty of interest, and for us, to find, "rara avis", a true painter. Finding such a work as the one of this painter from Navarre, means for the critic an odd moment of good luck. Especially when in her work happens even the difficult expressive situation of the explosion or festival of colours; and without the painting finally foundering in just striking effects.
Salvador Martín Cruz
Art Critic
EL PAIS - Edición Cataluña - QUADERN pág. 6 - 11/12/97
B U L E V A R
LA PRESENCIA DE LA AUSENCIA
Uno de los caminos más difíciles pero a la vez más atificantes para el artista es hacer caber el máximo de discurso con el mínimo de recursos plásticos. Es la gran lucha para eliminar todo lo superfluo para reforzar la idea que se quiere expresar. Es explicar el máximo con la síntesis, con la insinuación o con el vacío. Eso hace Ricard Salvatella, que expone conjuntamente con Elena Gascón en la galería Metropolitana. Salvatella pinta cuerpos y paisajes intentando que sea la fuerza de la pincelada la que exprese todo el sentimiento. Por su parte Gascón nos habla de la persona, pero no lo hace con la descripción del detalle, sino mediante la búsqueda de la esencia. Estrada, en la sala Alejandro Sales indaga la estructura de la obra; Inmaculada Arricivita en la galería Manifiesto presenta la sugerencia de sus sentimientos para que cada espectador los interprete.
Otra forma de intentar decir mucho mas de lo que las limitaciones materiales de un cuadro pueden ofrecer es dejar que el espectador interprete lo que ve. Al menos es lo que intenta Inmaculada Arricivita con su pintura sobre seda. "Mis cuadros no tienen titulo porque espero que cada cual, al contemplarlos, sea con su sensibilidad, emoción y fantasía, quien capte todo cuanto las obras puedan sugerir".
La pintura sobre seda tiene el mismo peligro que la acuarela, un salto sin red que no permite rectificación. Pero Arricivita se arriesga a conservar el equilibrio en esta peligrosa voltereta. El resultado son unas inquietantes pero a la vez seductoras zonas de color que reflejan mundos tanto de sombras como paradisíacos.
JAUME VIDAL
