Born in Nicolosi (CT) and graduated from the Art High School of Catania, Alfina Miceli associates her passion for art with the visceral love for nature, and for the strength it has to produce in the human soul profound well-being and regenerating balance, through those visual and sensorial stimuli that the artist is able to transliterate in the work of art and offer to the viewer's vision.

 

The study and the technical ability of Alfina Miceli lead her to approach the art with a classical approach, maneuvering herself between different pictorial techniques, but always departing from the mere reproduction of the existing, filtered through the fantasy and the original and skillful use of color, modulated in the rendering of lights and shadows. To the technical expertise of reproducing features and environments with fidelity, Alfina Miceli combines the ability to transmit that vital heartbeat that pervades our surroundings, faces, bodies, city views, nature, all permeated by a force that we perceive through the colors that emerge from the darkness, illuminated by that light that floods them with life-giving lymph, or that is reflected by producing nuances that evoke memories and sensations that are, first of all, tested by the artist himself. Alfina's subjects range from portraiture, to urban landscapes, to symbolic and mythological themes, proposing a personal vision of what the artist perceived. A subject therefore, evokes a memory, a dream, an emotional experience, a symbol that brings us back to a personal and at the same time universal dimension, being the world permeated by the same vital and emotional force.

 

In "Ginestra", we observe a sensual female figure that represents our land of Sicily, which inevitably attracts to itself for its magnetic beauty, immersed in a frame of bright and vital colors and framed by the symbols of our land: the hair, gathered among the branches of the corals, are the waves of our sea, where the light of the sunset is reflected, in the background colored tiles of mosaics and ancient majolica, symbol of our traditional art, the wheel of the cart behind which one can see abstract colors, which they represent what our earth could still offer. The red of the dress, the color of Etna's passion and lava, contrasts with the black veil, like the ashes of the volcano, alluding to the mournful and negative aspect that even underlies the reality of our land. In hand, our beautiful woman holds a bunch of gorse, colorful and fragrant flower but at the same time wild and leathery, able to adapt and flourish in the heat of our difficult and beloved Sicily, intoxicated by its beauty.

 

In "Eros and Psyche" we see the Greek myth of the beautiful Psyche ("Soul") re-proposed in a very personal and up-to-date key, which, so attractive as to be venerated like Aphrodite, arouses the ire of the goddess who entrusts Eros ("Love ") to make her fall in love with her arrows "of the most abject, the last of men": Eros, however, intentionally strikes at his foot, leading Psyche into an enchanted palace and joining her in the darkness and never showing face to face, to make the young woman, believing him a monster, kill him freeing him from his painful task ... Instead, she abandons herself to the passion for her invisible spouse, their love burns in the darkness and in the painting, While Eros remains in the shadows, Psyche emerges from the darkness, in full light in her sensuality and in the abandonment in the passionate arms of her beloved.

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Alfina Miceli not only excels in pictorial art, but, as a pupil of the master and craftsman Barbaro Messina, also engages in the production of works in ceramicized lava stone, in which she expresses not only the undoubted technical abilities in spatial and chromatic composition, but also the uncontrollable fantasy and flicker of the artist's healthy "madness", representing both the classical and popular myths of our Sicilian land, and the new instances of social equity and the individual's need to self-affirm their own personality. Her works are exhibited permanently at the "School Museum of Ceramics on Lava Stone of Etna" in Nicolosi.

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E. C.