Critics who wrote about her:
Elena Agudio, Jean Blanchaert, Jara Bombana, Vittorio Bustaffa, Angelo Calabrese, Milena Cordioli, Saverio Simi de Burgis, Isabella Dilavello, Enzo Di Martino, Enzo Fagiani, Giovanna Galli, Alessandra Galvani, Elena Gennai, Barbara Ghisi, Alessandro Giovanardi, Giovanni Magnani, Antonella Mallus, Eros Olivotto, Monica Saracino, Giorgio Segato, Fortunato Orazio Signorello, Giorgio Trevisan.
“It’s just the Nature, the Animal Kingdom, endless source of thought and creativity in its act of representation, in its being the mirror of the human spirit, its fury and quietness. And it’s good that Man does not forget his human animality, if he doesn’t want be overwhelmed by it.
So come on, come into this zoo without cages.
Although they may seem closed in the space, constricted on the paper, confined in the terracotta, the animals you will meet explode with their wild, instinctive, dramatic, grotesque and light beauty.
On the walls, Iva Recchia’s animals appear on shiny paper, in a game where colours wipe themselves, colours which do not cling to the surface but aim to slide away. Through experimenting, daring and using not only brushes but also feathers, paper and sponges, a real and fantastic bestiary comes to life, with flying birds, puzzles dogs, smiling apes, where the colour, disappearing, underlines a movement, sometimes an emotion, a request, an attention. In fact, it is not a servile imitation of the animal being, but a halt in time/space, looking for that moment which draws it closer to the human being.”
(Dilavello, mostra IL BESTIARIO, 2009)
“A kind of urgency of the sign exceeds the necessity of dwelling on the changes and the contrasts of the colours. Nature is read through inner images, all closed in human gestures and gazes. There is a necessity of preserving the feeling from any kind of romantic or illusively dreaming meanness, as it is the very act of the hand on the surface that pursues the side of the nature that cannot be explained by the mind.
It is also for this reason that every figure, portrait or body, possesses no seductive or fascinating traits, in order to sensuality. The faces portrayed, the flesh as surface, turn down on themselves.
The figures remain and talk to themselves. We witness to the research of a truth that is not the appearing or the making appear, but it is searched by a strong request of presence, of being, of protection.
Here the motion is apparent, there is, rather, a suspension.
The fully white background represents the extreme will to not compete with nature and not to represent it, imitating it for the sake of it. It’s the will that Iva reveals starting with paintings on canvas which dislike veiling and backgrounds. The photographic paper, which Iva finally prefers as support, cannot receive materic superimpositions. The white background, in the painting tradition, represents nature itself and Iva is well conscious of that.
The figure stands out on an absence which is absolute presence of the whole and, for this reason, invisible, white.
The gesture of painting, which produces the compositive lines, searches a place of recognizability. In an uncertain balance between identity and its loss, the figure gets rid of the need of representing that specific subject. It doesn’t narrate, it represents. Every man, woman or child, every figure, every subject doesn’t change from himself, except for those recognizable details which put in evidence a unique own nature, set free in as many frames of mind as those numerous signals which dig up and search inside and on the surface, in that specific nature which allows us to mirror and therefore recognize ourselves …”
(Bustaffa, exposition PICCOLE GRANDI ANIME, 2009)