The decisive feature in the work of this Lombard artist has always been the relation between word and image. But this work for Fabbri does not become comprehensible in the moment you read the title.
What has Tim Burton got to do with Fabbri Amarena sweets? The fifty-year-old American actor and film director, famous for his visionary films of neo-gothic setting, is one of the artist’s favourite film-makers: like him, she feels close to the characters she paints, characters that are on the margins of— or in open conflict with —society.
Roberta Savelli, too, tends to interiorise everything; she is solitary and at times disconnected from the world. However, her starting-point is always that real world. Her paintings are oil portraits done on gauze, with the result that the form has a certain impalpable quality; the lightweight white surface makes her images seem to vibrate in the air. A year ago Roberta Savelli went back to drawing on paper, returning to the set design where she first trained or exploring the possibilities of book illustration, a field that has always tempted her. Her works tend to depict a middle land inhabited by ageless children, by young girls who do not want to grow up and by jars of Amarena sweets hidden away within a wonderland.