ABOUT HER WORK
At the center of Siaofeng Nigro’s work is a strong conviction. Powerful, pulpy bursts of color and deliberate lines reveal a violent crack in the middle of a pomegranate. The fist-sized fruit becomes overwhelming, and the tiniest details of the fruit’s flesh are enlarged, highlighting the cracks in its surface, the hollow grooves where seeds have come loose, and the folds in which darkness lurks. The pomegranate known in art and literature for its mythological and divine meaning has another expressiveness in her work. She wants to emphasize the enormous power from which the fruit has lost its shape and through which the seeds become visible to express the importance of beauty of diversity.
Her drawings are intense, often capturing the moment just after the fruit has burst. It is a moment of reprieve, perhaps shock, after an eruption: the calm after the storm. In her work, she draws parallels between processes in nature that lead to excesses, and processes in human life that clash and lead to excesses.
Siaofeng Nigro, 1963, was born in Amsterdam to parents of Italian and Chinese descent, both of whom experienced the harsh reality of war. Having a bicultural background and growing up in a right-wing neighbourhood in the late 1960s and ‘70s, she became aware of the differences between herself as an individual and the people of the quarter she lived in. She learned to embrace this difference in adulthood, by experiencing that diversity enriched her personality. Diverse people color the mass and are norm-breaking. Diversity, she notes, broadens our perspective and balances our moral views.
A pomegranate in a burst state is in her vision a portrait of the beauty of diversity that emerged from a terrifying situation. All of its features were lost due to a growing tension from the inside. Where you can see the beauty in the seeds erupting from the destruction of the shell; the shimmering hope of the future emerging from the cracks of the past. Such imagination can be seen as a portrait of herself and of diversity. The beauty of diversity is always born out of excesses leading to liberation
Light bounces over the subjects, the lines, which range from vigorous to fragile, hint at some movement, and the fruits sit at the precipice of performance. Considering the depth of the colors, one might be surprised to learn that her source images are simply found on the internet. They are retransmitted to the viewer so intensely that one can feel her story. Her imagination animates the image, and one sees beauty before one ever notices the damage from which that beauty blooms.
Any pencil, thread, glue, watercolor pigment, or collage composition could come into play to achieve this birth of sorts. The black paper, or sometimes darkened backgrounds and clair-obscure effects that adorn the fruits’ calyxes, transform the otherwise quotidian pomegranates into huge subjects which draw attention to an important event. Each fruit is the subject of the painting, never the object. Siaofeng anthropomorphises the fruits to portray the beauty of diversity that results from the human struggle.