Roberta Bernabei: A Symbolised Gem

The wrist, the neck, the ankle, the fingers, but also other precious joints of our body, are the ‘places’ for which Roberta Bernabei has conceived and made her creations for several years. Even before becoming pieces of jewellery they were, due to the congenital ability to produce wonder and therefore admiration, authentic satisfaction and a lightness for the senses: plastic elaborations of remarkable quality and authenticity.

In fact, an aspect of her practice that immediately struck me from that time in which I followed her promising initiation in the study of art at the Academy in Perugia, was her determined countenance and ideative passion. Her imagination, sop disposed to dream, rendered ‘precious’ everything falling under her gaze by transforming or enclosing it in a form. This allowed her to arrive with great immediacy at an intuition of the ‘whole’, at its conception and design, the prelude to the realisation of a piece of jewellery. A particular way of imagining any small residue of metallic or lithic material, or any obsolete, declined and already abandoned element, recoverable in a form that would regain just prominence if worn. Furthermore, her way of starting working reflexively, that is to say by conceiving micro-sculptures on herself, permits her to think about her work and shape it with the greatest freedom.

A knowledge of the various historic forms of the jewel and the precious objects of divers epochs does not prevent her from combining those lines, those drawings, and those forms with her conceptions in order to obtain new organisms whose characteristics make a strong claim to be of our time, in addition to recognising the traditions of innovation.

The most relevnt and therefore distinctive element of her art, that which distinguishes it from other equzally good artist jewellers, is the projection of sense that every creation possesses […]

Consequently before the ‘ankles’ and ‘pendant’ by Bernabei decorate such elect parts of the female body, they arouse in our perception an eloquent signal and wish to understand the ‘significative keys’. […..]

It is the case to affirm that, even though the journey is long for a young artist, her promising beginning of accomplished experiences reveal that the continuance of time, will become an ever expanding theatre of creative pleasure; one that Bernabei already knows how to exploit and transform into a formalised ‘gem’.