The art of Antonella Quacchia, explored through the words of internationally recognised critics, curators, and art historians.
In My Own Words
When I read what critics write about my work, I am always struck by how clearly they perceive what I often feel only as an interior pressure — the need to translate states of being into matter and light. Their words confirm that the work travels beyond me, that it arrives somewhere real in the viewer's experience. Reading these texts is, for me, a form of dialogue: they describe landscapes I recognise, though I could not have articulated them so precisely myself. What I look for in my own work is a quality of aliveness — a sense that the surface is still breathing, that the gesture has not yet settled. Whether I achieve it, I cannot always tell. These voices help me understand when I do.
Il lavoro di Antonella Quacchia affonda le radici in esperienze di dislocamento. È nata in una città divisa dove la guerra fredda ha avuto il suo equivalente italiano: il Muro di Gorizia, un contesto che diventa simbolo di nuove separazioni, una migrazione in Brasile e conseguente adozione in una nuova famiglia. Queste fratture portano una consapevolezza preziosa: il movimento può trasformare il trauma in possibilità. Il suo linguaggio artistico nasce proprio da questo attraversare continui confini, geografici e identitari. La sua pittura è un luogo di appartenenza fragile e mutevole dove si percepisce una tensione costante, un’identità sempre in viaggio, mai del tutto arrivata.
From a unique perspective that was shaped by a long professional life in the scientific field, working for many years at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), a fundamental principle was imprinted in Antonella Quacchia: reality has many facets, and its perception changes depending on the observer, a concept closely aligned with quantum physics, thus the possibility of multiple truths, multiple ways of understanding her journey and rewriting it with new words. This was enhanced in her subsequent work at ILO (The International Labour Organization), where the vision of so many different cultures became prove of how perspective changes the meaning of each concept and each story: it offers new dictionaries and multiple possibilities to survive definitions.
Antonella Quacchia personal story and her fractures are echoing forced migrations, contested territories, painful frontiers. They speak of the human tendency to fragment reality in order to understand it, risking then to get lost in the attempt to put it back together. They tell of individual and collective solitude, showing how beauty can sometimes be lacerating, like a wound that keeps breathing. Ultimately her artworks are multiple ways to tell her story, alternatives that become a universal reflection on contemporary fragility: isolated individuals, weakened connections, communities falling apart. In a world where atrocities are still committed in the name of identity and belonging, one might even imagine that the absence of belonging could represent the highest form of community, one in which no one dominates and no one is excluded, where everyone shares the same open, vulnerable human space.
Antonella Quacchia's artistic creations originate from an emotional core driven by a fascinating perceptive capacity, which expresses a profound spiritual tension. Her works arise from natural movements, nurtured by gestures that delicately reveal the introspective impulse, becoming immersive matter.
From the material with which she constructs works inhabited by a strong energy, the artist reveals visions driven by chromatic emotions that release harmonious dialogues, establishing a poetic relationship between pigment and luminous reflections.
In her three-dimensional bohemian crystal glass installations, Antonella Quacchia succeeds magnificently in combining nature with human constructions, art with industrial production, generating new meaningful assemblages.
Her works - at once painting, sculpture, and installation - create immersive environments where light, transparency, and colour become generators of ecological narratives.
Quacchia's pictorial language arises from the experiential flow, from the artist's sentimental experience that transposes on canvas the emotional states, the inner tensions: they become dynamic formal paths, compositional solutions whose apparent simplicity houses powerful evocative force.
Each work is an act of liberation, a gesture of consciousness that does not imitate but transforms: the image acquires the strength of truth when it translates mood into light, movement into colour, experience into vision.
Antonella Quacchia investigates the theme of landscape and the sensible horizons of reality that become, in her artistic research, a metaphorical journey into the depth of the human soul. In her abstract compositions, the observer is confronted with a language of colour and matter that speaks directly to the senses.
Quacchia's expressive language is characterised by chromatic harmonies and spatial rhythms that recall the emotional power of abstract expressionism, while maintaining a personal and intimate dimension, profoundly linked to her scientific background.
In the pictorial language of Antonella Quacchia one perceives the echo of ancient knowledge combined with absolute modernity. The matter she employs is not merely a vehicle for colour but becomes an instrument of revelation of an inner universe, a threshold between the visible and the invisible that invites contemplation.