Artistic
approach
Bettina Massa's artistic approach is based on a questioning of time, through a reflection on memory and myth.
After having imagined and composed a precise project, she creates a first draft in oil on large sheets of thick black paper made by hand in the monasteries of Bhutan. Then, deliberately, she puts the initial version of her project to the test of the random reactions of this support, because it has the particularity of absorbing the first draft which fades in part, leaving only a tenuous trace visible. She proceeds by overlapping, erasing, layering layers. Attentive to the "whims" of the support, she seizes it to continually rethink her initial project.
Her creative process is based on this dynamic of "endangering" her project, which leads her to explore unpredictable paths.
Her pieces are presented in the form of polyptychs, suites or series. She works by continuities, juxtapositions and ruptures, as many ways to decline the questioning of time and memory. In her polyptychs, she juxtaposes several sheets. Each sheet keeps its autonomy, while the composition continues on the adjacent sheet. Each element is a fragment of a whole that unfolds outside the frame, leaving open the possibility of indefinitely extending the work.
Bettina Massa continues her research work by experimenting with new techniques, from painting to sculpture in bas-relief, from canvas to polystyrene, from oil to pigments captured in fresh plaster... Her early works are strongly influenced by Mediterranean cultures and their mythologies. Her encounter with theater and her scenographic creations allowed her to broaden her field of research by moving from the plane of the painting to the space of the stage, from the time immobilized by the painting to the time of the show which flows, from the relative perenniality of the plastic work to the absolute ephemerality of the live show. These experiences have nourished and enriched her pictorial research.
Through her work, she questions reality by seeking to grasp the time that, ineluctably, flows and never freezes, except to be seized in the instant of the act of painting.
“Bettina Massa's painting is as vibrant as it is complex, because it is highly cultivated, steeped in a modalized Renaissance Humanism, as was this same Humanism that had to distance itself from Greco-Latin thought in order to exist.”
- François Speranza, art critic, Brussels
BiographY
Born in Corsica, Bettina Massa lived from childhood in the proximity of the works of the great masters of painting. Her father worked at the Fesch Museum in Ajaccio, which allowed her to regularly visit the Italian Primitives: Botticelli, Titian, the Neapolitan Caravaggio... This privileged relationship with the art pieces will durably nourish her imagination, confront her with different techniques and, quite naturally, lead her to develop a personal approach to pictorial creation.
She is a visual artist as well as an art teacher. She is also active as a scenographer in the field of the performing arts. She has designed sets for professional directors in Paris, Casablanca, Jerusalem and Brussels.
She has exhibited in Corsica, Paris, Brussels and London.