Laura Tarabocchia, born in Genoa on 12 March 1963, lives and works in Savona,
where he devotes with passion the bookbinding art. The artist was fascinated
by the marbling and the mimicking of shapes, typical of the richly coloured peacock tail, created by the Chinese in the III century a. C. and used in Europe till the 19th century by the bookbinders for book covers.
She has performed successfully not only in the work of binding, but also in the artistic field. In this way Laura Tarabocchia has developed a technical and an artistic research, witnessed by Laura’s Cards, that has no comparison. Hers is a very personal rereading of the technique of painted paper that she is able to turn in an artistic tale, though coming from a production almost mechanically repetitive.
Her performance is always very peculiar, while she uses that ancient, sophisticated, but well-documented technique, in which the water is an essential agent. Her patient work in the creation of coloured twisting shapes owns a sense of deep imagination, a good taste for colours and a big love for what she is bringing out, that only a soul, which draws inspiration by art, may have the knowledge of.
Anna Maria Faldini
The ancient technique of painted paper survives only in some exclusive bookbinding shops and Laura’s Cards are a very interesting example of it. The marbled and twisted shapes, created by the Chinese around to the III century a. C. and whose secrets, discovered by the Mongolian in the VIII century arrived through the Persian and the Arabs, in the XIII century in Spain, France, Netherlands and finally, in the XVI century, in Italy.
Peacocking and marbling shapes decorated backgrounds of manuscripts and valuable miniatures for a lot of time. Later, with the coming of industrialization and mechanization, they were restricted almost exclusively to embellish the paper used by bookbinders for book covers until they disappeared, almost totally in the XIX century,
Laura Tarabocchia is a strong woman, enthusiastic and imaginative. Someone told me about her skill and the rarity of her work. I wanted to meet her and she, with great generosity and enthusiasm, agreed to host in her workshop my class of students of the Artistic High School with specialisation in Italian ancient artistic properties. From that meeting came out a wonderful experience.
Laura not only told, explained, showed, but in a practical way dragged the students in her work: they sewed on pages of books with needle and thread, they printed gold shining characters on the skin covers. But the most important thing was that they saw her giving birth to small masterpieces: Laura’s Painted Cards.
Pure abstraction outcomes from the colours used by Laura with rapid gestures. With very simple tools she tames, gives shape, creates overlays of colours in an absolute personal and simple way and gives issue to a work which is the offspring of an ancient technique, but it is absolutely new in our times.
Laura creates her Cards not only with elegant and richly decorative art, but also with genuine needing of expressing herself. It is possible to perceive this when she goes all over her doing with critical eye. Then it seems that Laura is looking, in the confluence of forms and colours, for the correspondence with the energy released from her mind. When she is not satisfied with her performance, when she thinks the shaping of it is insuitable, she will look for perfection until her thought and her hand manage to tame the matter.
Rita Sciolti De Albertis
In order to understand the charm that Laura Tarabocchia is able to create with her cards (and not only with them) it is necessary to see her working. It is incredible to see how, only with a simple gesture, a sheet of White Paper becomes covered suddenly by colours and shapes that create a delightful ensemble. It seems she is possessed by a magic wand: the sheet of paper passes through a liquid, wisely coloured by her, and here is: an art work is coming out!
On the contrary Laura has no magic wand nor she relies on enchanted and witched brew. With simple tools and a mixture of colours, made by her, she can create true masterpieces. When I asked in which way her passion was born in her, he replied: " by chance…".
This young woman, in fact, is a person full of artistic skills but she is also full with an inner strength leading her to find the ways to achieve and express what she has in the deep of her mind. And looking and studying for the technique of marbled and twisted shapes over paper, after years of attempts, Laura’s Cards were born.
Of course Laura did not stop here: after the Cards, here are the masks, the candle holders, large and small ceramic objects, but all those works arrived after her books, enhanced by her Cards and personalized by her golden writings. Then plenty of other creations are coming out, day after day, which the imagination of our artist contrive to dream out again an again, because she is never satisfied with what she has reached so far, but she is always looking for some new wonderful experience.
Rosanna Balocco Bassetti
Laura Tarabocchia devotes her work, full of great taste and technical skill, to her Cards, widening its employment (from valuable albums to CD caddies). The flames of elegant decorations become precious covers and improved binds: Laura’s work makes them unique crafted objects.
The silk, today, has the leading role in the new searching field in which Laura Tarabocchia is looking: the technique of oil colour sprayed and drawn in water. Then it is necessary the speed of gesture, supported by bright ideas, to achieve ever new artistic outcomes in which the colour range of the various pigmentations gives birth to whirlpools of signs, baroque decorations, kaleidoskopic games of light (from magmatic red to purple, from yellow to solar silent blue), refined by naturalistic references.
This trend may lead her to many new creative outlets. She has already undertaken this path, in part linked to fashion (through small pillows to gifts and household articles) which, of course, will reserve us some surprise when we consider her personal whim, her application to the technique, her manual skill and, first of all, her iron will to seek always different kinds of creative expressions.
Silvia Bottaro
Between Art and craft often there is a thin borderline and to admire the splendid Laura’s Cards reminds me a sentence of W. Morris "… the object made by a craftsman will not be by chance more valuable (as suggested Plato) than the artist’s who imitates the object made by the craftsman,..…".
Laura’s Cards come from an ancient handmade technique, but are viewed anew in very special key.
The process she is using is actually a printing technique, but it is not possible to find two equal sheets of paper, because the artist’s intervention prevents that to happen. Laura makes each sheet to be an experience by itself, performing movement and colour in a very personal way.
Laura Tarabocchia creates: she dips each sheet of paper in colour and sometimes she shakes, sometimes she mixes, sometimes she gives birth to shades, sometimes she looks for special effects. The technique of the marbling and the mimicking of richly coloured shapes, typical of the peacock tail, becomes a pretext for her cards, her paintings, and her graphics.
Roberta Porsenna-----------------------------------------
logoDS.jpg)