Rosanna Rossi (Cagliari 1937), after completing her studies at the Zileri Art Institute in Rome, returned to the island in 1958. After initial experiences within the activities of Studio 58, characterized by an expressive figuration altered by material suggestions, her research in the following decade shifted towards an abstraction that combines naturalistic reminiscences in the use of color with the signifying connotations of informal matrix.

In the subsequent developments, despite periodic forays into the realm of ready-made, this design ambivalence is maintained, constantly oscillating between a constructive order of concrete origin and material-expressive solutions of neo-informal abstraction. A teacher at the art high school from 1968 to 1983, she taught in various specialization courses and from 1984 to 1990 at the European Institute of Design. Since 1970, she has been involved in permanent installations in public spaces. Her work continues to explore traditional languages but within an unusual figuration. In parallel to her own pictorial language, she identifies new expressive possibilities achieved with poor materials, found, differently used, surpassing the previously expressed tradition.

What strikes most about Rosanna Rossi is the tenacious ability and determined attitude with which, as a woman and artist, she has faced a long journey of existential and aesthetic choices, a journey filled with the serenity and tranquility of someone who operates with sincere devotion in the field of contemporary art, a path marked by works that follow and strengthen each other in their evolutionary coherence. As a man, I have great respect for her ability as a woman from the island to claim a place in Italian art history that rightfully belongs to her. It is not a cliché where women have struggled and suffered more to be recognized at the same level as men, sometimes less interesting but more appreciated and included in the artistic system simply because gender was a dominant and determining condition. Others, before Rosanna Rossi like Carol Rama and Maria Lai, have faced with the same courage the arduous path of sincere research and total devotion to work, making it a life choice that goes beyond mere occupation.

Certainly, being physically distant from international artistic and intellectual crossroads and not being constantly present in the nodes of our country's cultural life has not made it easy for her to be immediately and universally appreciated. Her presence with public and private solo exhibitions has been sporadic but built on a daily and constant work that is now the tangible and direct testimony of all her commitment. Her work, always in tune with the times, has allowed her not to be on the margins of European thought but to live in a contextual way the artistic and cultural demands of the over fifty years of production she has traveled, making her the companion of other important and recognized artists and critics, from Studio 58 to Gillo Dorfles, who have paid her words and comments of great appreciation on several occasions. I feel particularly honored and happy to be able to contribute by adding a piece to her exhibition path and by promoting this important body of work built and realized with a coherent ethic and in the utmost professional ethics.