From matter to the soul.
The metamorphic sculptures of Damaris Zehentmayer.
Dr. Elena Gradini, art critic (english version by Gallery “Il Collezionista)
A latent meaning and visceral is hiding behind every fold, every crack, of the sculptures of the artist Damaris
Zehentmayer. Works that recall to an immense variety of approaches, etymologically significant, in the sense
that from their observation gush all a series of opened possibility of interpretative reading. Trough the earthen-
ware, the ceramics, the artist makes to speak her feelings reflecting the complex elaboration of a vision that
draws her own source of inspiration from the real world that surrounds it, and which does not always is
simplified. In fact, the ideas borrowed make reference to our present, local and global together. There is the
nature, the sense of the metamorphosis, analyzed as an evolutionary process in itself, the analysis of the man
in his context of reference, linked to hopes and uneasiness, the all reworked through a personal unconventional
modus, that starting from the first mental inspiration, it passes through the manual gesture and is plasma in the
matter and its several declinations. Lights, shadows, thicknesses, folds, are the mediums that allow gradually
to the image to reveal itself and which allow to the spectator to reach to the visual imput to rework a personal
aesthetic vision. Realizing a sculpture implies always a procedure of loss and acquisition, of exaltation and
oblivion, and it is precisely on such contrasts that is graft the work of Zehentmayer, in the continuous search
for artistic cues. Thus the nature and the man are find again to confront in a parified condition. Both are caught
in their biological state linked to the change, to the normal evolution of the life. There is not only the artistic
message in her works but rather an anthropological-social reference that is spelt intentionally by thematic
well delineated. These are the delicate topics linked to the hope, to the desire for a better future linked to the
dislocated destiny that today concerns an infinite variety of the human race; there is the matter, dense and
plastic, which gives to the work its own existential dimension all-round. Ultimately, there is the coexistence
of all those components that constitute our stratified and global reality, and which are well synthesized within
her works, which offer themselves as instants of reality of the meaning changeable and solid together, thanks
to the exquisite combination that the artist knows to give back in the complex dialectic matter-image.