By Egidio Maria Eleuteri
À la recherche du temps perdu could be a description of the art of Niké Borghese, but in reality, we are not dealing with a “search”, but with a recalling of places, monuments, piazze, images, landscapes, and everything else to do with what we call our “roots”.
These pictures are born from the need to recover landscapes, places, the Roman Campagna, not as actual copies, but as narrative or as complete descriptions, based on the particular emotions perceived and transformed by Niké Borghese into works that are not the typical repetitions of other artists, but poetic stories that have evolved from her creativity.
Some of her pictures portray monuments and ruins from our remote heritage, eternal evidence of our grandiose civilization, shown to the observer in a contemporary atmosphere made up of scaffolding, tubes, cages (today's world), which “cage” the past, not to protect it, hide it or highlight its decadence, its end, but to enliven it in a heightened recognition that the present gives to the past. All this scaffolding is a sign of today's recognition of yesterday.
The stories if Ninfa dwell in a unique atmosphere, which transports us immediately into a world that reflects a life made up of long walks, of days spent in the country, in the mountains, near streams, around Rome, observing the myriad colours, the many shades of flowersl, secret natural groves and ponds where cattle come to drink, the deafening din of locustas and grasshoppers, the rapid apparition of fireflies - now gone, the scents of a countryside of which we have sadly lost trace, and the extreme beauty of a meditative moment observing the wondrous silver moonlight illuminating the landscape where its shadowes are outlined by a fleeting thrill of light that seems almost to reveal the fragile, confused traces of forefathers who dominated the known world.
Her etchings deserve a special note of attention. From these works transpires that feeling of majesty and greatness typical of Piranesi, with that unawareness of the absolute that few artists succeed in capturing.
The artistic language of Niké Borghese's etchings belongs to the immediate present, showing different images, glimpses and views, ruins and even sounds in which past humanity is absent, but in the very places where they lived and worked, and in which Borghese, almost by magic, makes us feel their continuing presence in an unreal atmosphere. It is in this very atmosphere that Niké Borghese uses the light of memory, bringing to her works what remains of that world, enwining them with a technique in which dream and reality meld together with a subtle vein of nostalgia for an era, a way of life, a world that will never return.
The art of Niké Borghese may appear simple, almost linear, of the classical school, but in reality it does not depict the banal reality of today, but recalls a sense of history.
