Yoella Razili: Artist a Day

By Cynthia Penna

2020

Rebirth is the dominant accent of Yoella Razili’s art. The artist operates a manipulation and reconstruction of fragments and scraps of wooden objects found by chance and assembled in unpredictable and imaginative sets that take new life under her expert hands through new shapes and new colors. The ultimate goal is that of a pure minimalism but with an accent of humanization given by the recycling of these fragments that have had a past life and history.

Therefore, a less formal minimalism, less closely interconnected with the work of Donald Judd or John Mc Cracken where the purity of the shape is accompanied by the purity of the material brought to its physical limit. The wood painted by Mc Cracken’s disappears behind the hand-polishing treatment resulting from hundreds of passages of paint and sand paper; Judd’s steel becomes almost unreal in the perfection of its polishing.

Razili’s wood is “human” in the sense that it has gone through the history of a family, a community, a person; it has absorbed smells, flavors, speeches, perhaps we can venture, even quarrels and loves and in any case the complex of human relationships between individuals. It was and is still alive despite the total transformation of its original function.

Razili’s work is halfway between concrete art deriving from precise constructive relationships of form in space and relationships between space and form, and “Arte Povera” in the sense of using recycled material and material of daily use and therefore itself “poor”, accessible, not destined to become major art.

From all this Razili creates rigorous and formally pure works, although full of a lyrical accent also due to soft colors, sometimes, pastel colors, sometimes more saturated colors but in any case balanced admirably in order to reach a harmony that produces strong emotions. These works are “soft” in the sense that they welcome and envelop the gaze and are full of feminine sensuality.

Razili’s works inspire memories, visions, situations that people have already experienced in their own personal sphere; these works invite you to travel in your individual time as a memory of the past or as a desire for future.