Body/Action

Following the idea of the open work of art, which took hold in the late Sixties, painting also experimented with new ways of realisation, and for some women artists in particular, this was in relation to the physical act of painting and their own bodies. The painting thus becomes the result of an action or a process that can be a trace of the action itself. One could consider Le Corbusier's "modulor" as the historical matrix of this process, which is based precisely on Leonardo's human body as a measure of architectural design. In the same way, the two artists presented in this chapter use a methodology whose unit of measurement is precisely their own bodies. For these artists, the act of creation is closely linked to the creative, manual act, to the physical and natural contact of their bodies with space and colour, the end result of which is the accumulation of coloured brushstrokes (Carmengloria Morales), superimposed and even erased (Maria Morganti). The act of painting is a testimony to being there, but it is above all a testimony to the process and the work of the artist.