Modelling Music

Mario Pasi

Domenica Regazzoni’s artistic path is articulated in a triple context: the return of the material, the reduction of the ancient figure to an abstract icon, and the emotional reconstruction of symbols. Her musical background is formidable, and her relationship with nostalgia powerful: her family is at the centre of a line that has at its extremes a father who was a violin-maker and a son who is a violinist, a line with a strong aesthetic meaning. At the beginning an emotional sanctuary, dedicated to the artisan building the cradle of music; and at the end the will to see this music reborn in the rationality of sound. But nothing can be born without human quality, of he or she who is alive, and so what sparks is an idea of love. The violin-maker is no longer there, but the traces of his work and his thought remain: they are part of the house, they are inserted in the furniture and sculpted forms, and by creeping in pieces of wooden material they participate in a special way, they rediscover the sky, t hey mirror existence, they assert – in differing timbres and colours, in part and in whole – a substantial presence and an indelible necessity. So the artisan and the artist, the creator and the performer, become one and the same thing, a single category. With a little imagination, dismembered, collected, reorganized and re-loved violins once again become sound, forever. The presence of the violin – a magical instrument, which still in Paganini’s time was considered demonic, because it was unimaginable that such an immense quantity of sound could emerge from a wooden box with a handle and strings grazed by a bow – is at the centre of the work of Domenica Regazzoni, violin-maker in her thoughts and partly in her hands. A work enriched by a changing play of sensations, whether they come from the Orient, and help to transform into poetry what at the beginning is only intuition, or emerge from the West of investigation, experiment and simplification, resulting in the exaltation of colour and the reducti on of form to a minimum. In this idea of art contents are powerful and always ignited by mythical inspiration. We can believe the artist has rediscovered the pleasure of the journey, the search for new harmonious continents, and the exploration of hidden oases that have thus far been ignored. But what would an artist be without incessantly departing for new shores, or without casting off part of his/her own past, or without being reborn differently each time from the image thrown back by a private mirror? The message of the “Thousand And One Nights” is perfect, infallible, if we recognize its stronger meaning: “narrating in order not to die”. All of us, at heart, are like Shéhérazade.