A study on "appearing" and "disappearing" - or on the exercise that, in an image society, the artist's critical view is on the equivocalness of the image, as "appearance" versus the apperception of the "substance" as an invisible universe. Or of the emerging of "useless appearance", where smoke is not only metaphoric but also a figure and tool. This can be summed up in the way Adele Lotito has developed, consistently, over more than two decades, where linguistic study has given shape to inner thoughts reaching out to the essence of reality. And where the aluminium sheet is the canvas and smoke and resin the colour – establishing an equipollence between the "support" and the "surfaces", placing Adele Lotito's research within a fundamental 20th century line. This can be found in the theme of the collection 'De-Forma' - "Overcoming the Informal/From Pictorial Perception to the New Abstraction", organized by Chiara Materazzo, and held last summer in the medieval hamlet of Castelbasso, where the Roman artist exhibited her most recent important works (2006/2007). Adele Lotito has chosen "smoke" as a linguistic-semantic element imbued with a value of unveiling, rather than obscuring, within a code that maintains, at the same time, the sign-gestural memory of ascendency and practices from chalcography, where the final act of creating a positive image is, however, eliminated, being unnecessary. Works like "procedure" and "process", describing the "alchemist transmutation" from matter to matter (wax/smoke). There emerges an evocative ensemble of "works in black", where each piece - the macro-sequence of a silent narration that germinates in the gathering together and unraveling of the patina from which the signs of the veiled and unveiled epiphany of images emerges in fragments – forms an autonomous and self-sufficient element. But, at the same time, it is in a changing dynamic relation to all the others, in a modular structure tending towards infinity. And infinity is the work that is semantically central to what has been presented by the artist in Rassegna De-Forma.
The deep structure of Adele Lotito's complete work is based on a sort of fleeting thought, seen as a consciousness of time and tout court existential condition, where – from the perception of the finite, made up of the closed space coinciding with the "size" of the aluminium sheet, which "limits", but is also seen as redundant because of the heavy iron frame, there is the impetus towards the unlimited lightness of writing in air – a series of opposite conceptual couples dialectically vie with each other and put off until last, mediated by dynamis vs stasis, the irreconcilable conflict of life vs death. Re-studying the path of Adele Lotitio's research, shifting from the works that have found an evocative mise en scene in the medieval structures of Castelbasso, such as Prezioso and Luna (Precious and Moon), or in the diptychs, Silenzio I and Silenzio 2, we see other essential thematic and formal nuclei emerging that strengthen the central one – the double motif, where the specularity and the subject of the treatment are from time to time different, between the biunique partition of the space and/or inserting, for contrast, a chromatic material such as a gold or silver leaf, or the ability to find, through intuition, the balanced situation in the different renderings of space and surface, between the point where transversal movement is generated and also the lines where the figurative elements emerge.
The strain to abandon the intolerable pondus of the human condition in order to draw on and narrate the infinite as immaterial is revealed in Adele Lotito's more recent works on paper, where the writing in air establishes itself tautologically as a linguistic and structural element of the work. This is in the same way that the "AIR" word-sign-writing finds the equivalent gesture-sign in the spiral-shaped traces that gather together and spiral out as in the flight of starlings, seen as a semantic equivalent of smoke, imprinted on white. The consciousness of beauty and, at the same time, of the transience of the thinkable and representable equilbrium coincides, at the end, with freedom as a single utopian conscience.