Roberta Scalvini: Illustrations of Psyche

The black non-colour is a victim of the popular preconception that associates it with a bad part of reality. Dark colors, implosive, are the mirror of the deep soul, of what is so dense that it traps light, not because it gets rejected or imprisoned but it gets internalized.

Roberta Scalvini is a master at animating the most difficult and abyssal colours. She’s a professional illustrator and a polymorphic artist and a fi nal-year student in Graphics and Communication. I can’t express her work with clearer words than those used by herself: “Colour is something extremely vital. In my work it is a way to lighten, to play down and to ridicule gothic contexts and to brighten up grotesque figures. Who defines me “dark”, merely takes a quick glance without understanding how important colours and life are in my world. Darkness is just a pretext to bring out light”.

The protagonists of Roberta’s pictures are often monsters, or rather, that part of us that even for a short period of life was felt marginalized, inappropriate, not peaceful.

“My monsters don’t arise to scare, at most they could give the impression of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, in short something we can recognize ourselves in”.

The passion for drawing and colour was born and raised with Roberta. Her study path reflects this visceral love: from the artistic high-school Foppa to the Decoration Bachelor degree at the LABA Academy, then she has exceeded the boundaries of the paper through the Academy of Digital Arts NEMO in Florence, before the two-year specialization at the Santa Giulia. This combined with continuous experimentation with diff erent materials: “When I was twenty I decided I had to learn how to model and I approached polymer resins and plastiline, materials that I still use together with ceramics, fabric, synthetic fur and anything that may help me to contrive puppets or complete the illustrations”. Illustrations which impart a sincere vitality. The author, in fact, totally striving for the present, captures with delicacy and intensity the more unperceivable vibrations in the energy of those around her, observing their soul with the gaze free from the burden of the future but illuminated by the experiences of the past. Roberta Scalvini transmutes her own clear perceptions in illustrations thus withdrawing the inner reality with mastery but also irony.

And the nightmare becomes a dream in the shade which cannot be abandoned.