We think that an artist should always work with brushes and colours. Otherwise, what type of artist are they? However, it's not always so, or better, it's not only like this. For instance, Kounellis defines himself as an artist even when he creates installations that weigh tonnes (with iron, coal, bags, coffee, oxen parts...). And as well, Adele Lotito, besides pencils, scissors and brushes, also uses, as her main tool of work, a simple wax candle. A candle she creates miracles with, lying on the ground, she "scorches" the aluminium and paper surfaces (canvas to a lesser extent) resting on a trestle and suspended above her. The spirals of smoke leave their mark on the above surface, but carefully guided by Adele's hand, and an abstract choreography, changing and evocative, appears, before being treated with fixatives or resins. For years, the skies have seen the passing and gathering of clouds, multiplying and creating a magnificent library of undefinable images, forming anthropomorhic and zoomophic shapes. Then, her phase of engraving began, opening up fine and subtle lines on the smoke. "Scratches" representing symbolic images – spirals, spiderwebs, feathers, flights of birds, eyes and many others. This artist's skies are populated by signs and shapes. Life emerges from nothing. Adele Lotito does not refute her lightness. Her gentle and spontaneous approach, her quick walk and sportive agility persist. Colours now come to the fore, mainly black and white, and sometimes gold and silver, and less often, red. For Hegel, red is the colour of colours, but Adele uses it sparingly. Only when necessary, when she wants to keep her emotions, and those of others who appreciate her rigour, under control. However, today, - and I can speak knowingly, being aware of the turning point in her work in the last two years - Lotito has taken on herself the burden of contributing to keeping artistically open the perspective of sense (each true artist establishes themselves in an absolute perspective). This means, that we influence things by chance, but also out of necessity (Monod). Thus, we need to look at interpreting necessity, to some extent and in some way, if we don't want to sink back into barbarism, abandoning ourselves to the course of natural events, to the more basic instincts and arrogance of power (these are dangerous at all times, but more so, now). The necessity that Adele draws on, and which she has become the spokesperson for, is that expressed by a logo-central Western mentality that has become worn down by the continual blows of media deregulation and the boorish simplification of only one way of thinking. The artist has realized and intends to react to this momentous threat. The very original way, I would say unique way, that Lotito has in carving out fragments of reasoning from the chaos and opening up, on the undefinable and irregular surface of the expanse of smoke, spaces for a possible meaning – letters of diverse idioms, numbers of today and yesterday (e.g. Roman numerals), brief words of past meanings. But more often, letters and numbers. Not signs and meanings, but rather significant elements from quavering edges and from a deliberately imperfect finish. Fragments of a possible communication, that can be realized on a verbal, literary and mathematical level only through correctly putting together the same letters and numbers. That is, keeping open the possibility of a meaning, a sense, without concealing the uncertainty of floating in a smoky sky of letters and numbers, untied and free, open to every possible conceptual idea, sublime like the Magnificat or diabolical like Mein Kampf. Could there be a wind that places those letters and numbers into an orderly series? Is this the question the artist raises? Will man know how to tackle the chaos or will he remain overwhelmed? I don't know if the intention of this Roman artist, already recognized as an expert and highly esteemed, and in recent times, regenerated with a new creative energy, is philosophical. I don't believe she is, strictly speaking. But what is certain, is that her work is able to interweave the emerging of a formal seduction, that is balanced and of a conceptual daring, with the challenge of a reasoning that forces us to have doubts. Adele Lotito's works are beautiful to look at, but also to think about. They feed the eye and the mind. As in the best of Italian tradition. Like Burri and Fontana. Boetti, Paolini and Kounellis (masters for her, but not passively experienced).
In-croci – the work proposed for the XIII Biennale di Arte Sacra – is a small but great masterpiece because it attains and sums up the story of the doing and thinking of this original and restless artist. The two panels, separate, but enriched in meaning by their being near each other – not a dyptich, but two works in dialogue with each other – draw together the letters of two alphabets which the world's terrorists would like to see armed one against the other. An Arab that emerges from a red surface giving himself an image of elegance, quite superior to the end of liberty. The Westerner that breaks up the surface of smoke – the artist is quite deliberate in her own alphabet, showing a weave that is both abstract and non-abstract, as, to avoid reproducing reality, the presupposed is presented, being the elementary condition of language – the letters being ungrouped and unbound. From this, the conceptual surfaces of Adele Lotito express the chance and the necessity, and in this interweaving, I believe, the secret of the beauty of her works is hidden. Because the deepest beauty is that which concerns authenticity, and thus, the truth. And truth, only when it is mathematical or geometrical, can be perfect and pure, uncontaminated life is always "dirty" like a newborn seeing its first light. Therefore, she mixes moods and ideals, fears and heroism, misery and sacrifices and, above all, the fear of death and the reaction to it. Chaos and cosmos. And when art nears life, that is the truth, and what is beautiful from this mix, must explode. It will be style that regulates the effects of this explosion. Adele's style is measured and controlled from a school stretching from Piero della Francesca to Mondrian, Lo Savio, Fontana and Manzoni. Measurement was the uttermost aspiration of the ancient Greeks (in fact, we have never really invented anything). The originality of this artist lies in placing her research in the wake of the most nubile conceptual tradition that we have developed from Florentine design up to Duchamp, without disregarding the influences of the heart and the geometry of feelings. When words and numbers cease to be distributed chaotically, then perhaps Adele will have reached her goal and will stop painting. But this will never happen!