A Soap Opera of Non-White Goods

Professor Gloria Lauri-Lucente,

Director of the Istitute for Anglo-Italian Studies

Deputy Dean of the Dep. of Italian

Faculty of Arts,

University of Malta

(2002)

"A Soap Opera of Non-White Goods is a series of paintings by Irene Canovari that recounts a story with no precise beginning and no precise ending, a story that introduces the viewer to the unfolding of events at no specific point in time, a story propelled by all the unexpected twists and turns of a soap opera. At the centre of Canovari's soap opera are two human figures or better still, two human silhouettes, a black silouhette with his blue fridge and a blue silhouette often accompanied by a pink washing machine, both of whom symbolize at one and the same time everyone and no one in particular. As the viewer follows these two characters' odyssey episode after episode, painting after painiting, she can trace their attempt to establish a rapport with apparently mundane objects such as the fridge and the washing machine, that is to say the domestic appliances or white goods which are transformed by the artist into visually joyous and colorful objects.

The cast of characters of this playful, postmodernist reinvention of the world of cartoons includes another pivotal figure, Oro the dog, who, like his human counterparts is bent on establishing contact with the outside world of the objects in an attempt to grasp an inner psychological truth which would give meaning to life. Together with these characters and objects, the world conjured by Canovari's art is also inhabited by a recurring number  of highly symbolic colours and shapes such as the coloured bubbles, whose myriad permutations constitute the infinite variations of a carefully crafted soap opera's plotline. Canovari's metaphorical use of the physical world constantly provokes the viewer's instinct for interpretation. Will the characters of this intriguing story ever establish a bond with the surrounding objects with which they live, or will they forever remain isolated within the silence of a secret, impenetrable world? 

Will the path of the black silhoulette one day coverge with that of the blue silhouette, or are these two characters destined to go their separate ways without ever meeting? What will happen next in the odyssey of this modern Ulysses or Everyman in this relentless quest for meaning and truth? Will life's secrets be unrevelled to him?

Rather than being closed off by answers, Canovari's work opens itself up to an endless series of intriguing questions which make up a narrative whose structure is self-perpetuating, and therefore unlimited, again very much like that of a soap opera. The relationship between Canovari's animate and inanimate objects remains a total mystery, an enigma which the characters keep to themselves but which, at the same time, demands confrontations that challenge the viewer to respond and to draw his own conclusions. Perhaps the most breathtaking novel aspect of Canovari's oeuvre is the paradoxical relationship between form and content , a relationship that is deliberately left unresolved. The viewer is stuck by the drama of unexpected juxtapositions between the bold lines and vivacious colours on one hand, and the inner solitude and sense of alienation on the other, between the playful use of the medium and the reflective mood that permeates in the canvasses, between the surface humour intermingled with gentle, even affectionate irony and the underlying deeper truths and complexities.

Profoundly sensitive to the mysterious life that emanates from the world of objects, Canovari is endowed with a ramarkable ability to seize the familiar and transform it into an explosive celebration of life. With a preference for large paintings in which she can give full play to her possibilities inherent even in the most familiar of objects such as the white goods of every household which, through the metamorphosing power of the imagination, can be transfigured into non-white goods enriched with private metaphors that tantalize us into deciphering them. Her painting invite us to immerse ourselves in the collective jouissance of postmodern appropriation and representation of the objects surrounding us- a sort of a game without end at play in the world of postmodernism".