The inclination to transcend the traditional canons of painting and sculpture lies at the foundation of Laura Alunni’s language. It is a metamorphic process that conditions her entire artistic experience, drawing upon the principle of construction and deconstruction, and turning the artwork into a boundary to be crossed in a continuous expressive renewal.

 

The result is an alternation of two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality, where the two conditions constantly blend and interpenetrate. Indeed, arriving at a programmatic definition of Laura Alunni’s work is no easy task; she finds her starting point in informal abstraction. This is an incipit influenced by the lessons of great masters such as the Basaldellas (Afro and Mirko), De Gregorio, or Mattia Moreni—artists whom Alunni instinctively intercepted, absorbing their work not through a direct relationship, but via a simple cultural osmosis, as frequently happens in art.

 

On the other hand, it is not difficult to detect in her painting a linguistic debt to the informal currents of the 1950s: color moves freely across the surface within casual forms, constantly in search of an ultimate definition that remains seemingly unattainable.

 

It is not difficult, yet neither is it taken for granted, given that the Italian tradition in these domains has produced artists of extreme refinement and intense expressive capacity who are difficult to imitate.

 

Thus, at first glance, the painter's terrain is well established within a consolidated tradition executed with substantial proficiency. Speaking more broadly, however, it must be said that artistic work generally demonstrates its maturity when it is capable of moving beyond the "already experimented" to open up to new and unprecedented experiences.

 

Thus, in Laura Alunni's case, this breakthrough manifests as an inability to keep painting confined within the cage of two-dimensionality, pushing it toward a sudden breakout and thereby triggering an encounter with sculpture.

 

The color that moves in flat areas within her paintings (see, for example, Aspettando la sera or Immersus emergo) conquers space thanks to the participation of material elements in plastic and ceramics. The transparency of plexiglass, combined with its malleability, gives rise to a series of unprecedented "luminous events" which, opening up to the three-dimensional component, leads painting toward the conquest of the surrounding environment. This is evident in the Connessioni series, where those very flashes of color encountered on canvas experience the sculptural adventure with the same expressive energy. Art history comes to our aid once again when we recall the plastic materials used in the mid-1960s by the Marche-born artist Sante Monachesi—a futurist fascinated by astronauts and the new perspectives of space conquest, who experimented with plexiglass to create a "light" sculpture of luminous and chromatic vitality. It was an "agravitational" dimension, as the artist defined it, and today it is uniquely evident how Alunni’s work simultaneously adheres to the poetics of construction and deconstruction professed by Cubism.

 

It is equally important to dwell on this latter theme. Indeed, it is impossible not to emphasize how Alunni’s sculptural action develops through an initial impulse of fragmentation using pre-existing ceramic elements, subsequently proceeding into a liberating reconstruction of plastic elements, in alternations of opacity and transparency, with an extension of three-dimensional space. That said, it appears evident that this impulse manifests the artist's instinctive need not to be satisfied with the result achieved, but rather to live an indissoluble inner battle of constant physical and mental overcoming.

 

The proof of this lies in her most recent production, which witnesses the return of painting as the reassembly of fragmented elements. Paintings such as Orme di paradiso or Prospettive evanescenti, to name just a few, now show the result of mental reorganization following preliminary programmatic dismemberment. Each single particle lives a life of its own, perfectly hinged within the essence of its uniqueness, yet feeling the need to unite into multicellular organisms almost as if wishing to give rise to new living systems.

 

If it is true that painting becomes three-dimensional, sculpture likewise performs the opposite process, in a continuous alternation of material solidity and chromatic fluidity. This entails a sense of disorientation, but also a dialectical enrichment that resists easy categorization.

 

Today, this outcome appears as Laura Alunni’s most original conquest, intercepting the most contemporary component of artistic expressiveness. She is no longer content with the traditional painting-sculpture dichotomy, but surpasses them both, opening up to new, unimaginable perspectives.

 

Andrea Baffoni