Biography

Eufemia Rampi is a painter of deep commitment and tenacious dedication. She entered the field of Art with great momentum at a young age. She is an artist in her soul; her works belong to an “Impressionism” steeped in the Tuscan Macchiaioli tradition. In her landscapes one feels depth; she is figurative just enough that her work is never subject to “Academicism”: it is free, and her freedom makes her sincere — it is her character that shines through her paintings. She has talent and uses it in the right measure: her works please because their message is clear and comprehensible, yet never photographic. Her enthusiasm for art is mirrored in her canvases; whether a motherhood or a seascape, her subjects are varied and, as far as possible, painted from life. I close this brief presentation by wishing the artist Eufemia ever greater success.

She approached painting at a very young age, training at the school of Professor Silvio Bicchi Junior — of the family of the great Macchiaioli painters of Livorno — and becoming herself a painter of the real. Eufemia portrays her chosen subjects en plein air: immersed in the space that contains them, inhabiting it, able to perceive not only forms, light and colour, but also scents and atmospheres. What are the landscapes of her paintings? Those any of us may encounter during the day — and not only in her native Romagna.

The artist's latest works are violet monochromes, in which she succeeds in bringing out the trapped essence of the soul. It is a colour rich in meaning: in Catholic culture it symbolises a time of reflection, preparation and penance. It is known as the colour of the Spirit and indeed, according to the studies of Carl Gustav Jung, it acts on the unconscious, giving spiritual strength and inspiration. It represents the union of Heaven and Earth, of Calm and Passion, of Wisdom and Love, of Blue and Red. It is the colour of Transmutation, of Metamorphosis, of Conversion. This colour expresses a pure, ancestral energy: a force bound to the vitality of red and to the intimate recollection of blue. Its hue is a blend of expectation and precognition, and as a message it carries the desire to raise human consciousness until it reaches white — pure light.

Eufemia Rampi is a painter in the classical tradition. This landscape of hers has a romantic cut and is wrapped in a poignant atmosphere. In an execution of remarkable talent, the author's care in delineating detail is evident. Here, a sky clearing to fair weather is mirrored in the transparency of a wide pool of water — perhaps a lake, or simply flooded ground. The liquid reflections and the poetic scenery of trees are rendered with striking incisiveness, in a handling that almost evaporates into the lyrical informal.

Eufemia Rampi's latest paintings were executed on antique linen, the heritage of certain Italian families of the early 1900s — I still remember its beauty in the trousseaux of my grandmothers and my mother. To say that her paintings are beautiful and interesting is an understatement. One breathes a nostalgic air — not as the Greeks meant by “nostos algos”, the pain of return, but a gentle nostalgia that recalls and shows the viewer a time gone by, which yet remains forever in the soul. You recognise this time in the violet shades of a face, of a gesture, of a soft Rimini landscape. The figures in her paintings are pensive, waiting, as if the world owed them something that is there, that exists, and that in any case belongs to present life. The colour violet — which has long symbolised a time of transition, like a flame that burns and, towards the end of its blaze, shows a violet hue before reaching full light — heightens the nostalgic value of the figures. Looking at these paintings, one thinks of waits, of returns, of time coming and going; and everything leads back to light and to the spirit, “the eternal yearning of man on his journey”.

The colour violet — the work of Rimini's last landscape painter.

The “gentle art” of Eufemia Rampi, the Rimini landscape painter trained in the school of the Tuscan Macchiaioli, is on show in her studio with her latest creations, from the rural tradition to artistic ceramics, while she experiments with printmaking techniques.

“En plein air” — the technique of the Impressionists, who painted from life while watching it change through the day: she has painted what she saw, in the school of her landscape and Macchiaioli masters; a painting you could almost touch, concrete and ethereal at once.

Violet, then, is an intimate, unrepeatable shade of the spectrum between red and blue. The English call it “purple”, which is not violet but closer to the French “lilas”, the lilac flower. Eufemia Rampi yearns for light well beyond the whiteness of her famous candles; she seeks the purity of materials — raw natural linen, glossy ceramics — transformed into dreams and butterflies.

The artist's white, after all, contains and is contained in every shade of the soul; it is intimately part of it.

“Waits and Returns”

Nietzsche holds that art is man's highest expression, and even says that art came to the rescue of the Greek man who felt, in his view, the horrible and absurd side of existence.

With “Waits and Returns”, a cycle of works romantically painted on her grandmother's linen sheets, Eufemia Rampi inaugurates an artistic vision as the expression of a victorious will, of a harmony, of an infallible perpendicular balance. Through our artist's expression we feel the desires of an intensified life fulfilled — an elevation of the feeling of life, and a stimulant of life itself.

“Waits and Returns” is a cycle of works masterfully tinted in the soft colours of violet and magenta, which seem to prophesy the eternal return as destiny. The general condition of man is chaos, in the sense of an absence of order; he is in constant becoming, with no state of stability — this is the only certainty we have.

Waiting in a station, in an airport, in any “non-place” where — as the anthropologist Marc Augé maintained — people can change, feel free of themselves, and play whatever part they choose. Places where, whether one arrives or returns, there is always the sense of a need to reaffirm oneself, and therefore to return eternally to oneself. Becoming, which knows neither satiety nor disgust nor weariness, must eternally return in order to depart again; with her works Eufemia Rampi invites us to reflect on the thought that this life, as we have lived it, will have to be lived again countless times.

“…going, coming, climbing, descending — so does man, until at last he dies.” Zazie in the Metro, Raymond Queneau

Reality is confronted in order to bring the inner reality to the light of colour. In the landscapes, attention flies free towards the horizon, while in the beauty of the day and of youth a vast silence unfolds.

When one encounters Eufemia Rampi's paintings, one immediately senses clarity of eye and sincerity. The language that distinguishes and qualifies her is the classical one — what today is called figurative. Her themes range from landscape to still lifes of various kinds. Her realist intent expresses faithfulness to the real and respect for it, but also that mimetic ability which comes from talent and from practice sustained by passion. Paintings in which the sea is the protagonist are frequent. The eye runs at once to the horizon line and loses itself in the dimensions of light, of silence, of solitude — in the physical space of the infinite and in the infinity of the mind. The light of the sea is fascinating; the correspondences between the sky and the immense mirror of the water, evocative. Pausing before these works, which hold the attention, one easily sees that they do not merely depict marine views: they also speak of the artist, of a longing for escape into beauty and, at the same time, of refuge in recollection. The iconographic repetition of her favourite subjects does not constrain freedom, which is a category of art. In every painting one notes a certain swiftness of execution, born of the conquest of an appropriate, assured style. Hand and eye do not linger over details. Here the leaves are not counted: they are patches flowing through green — dark or murky in the shaded areas, bright in the exposed ones, tending to blond as autumn approaches. Flowers are the musical notes of her palette. Whether cut or seen in their natural setting, they strike up a particular beauty that reaches deep. Their colours are not gaudy; one might call them meek and sweet. They kindle the promise of a smile.