The following article was originally published on Espoarte.net

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Iwanu ga Hana is a Japanese phrase that means «Don't say it is a flower» and this is the title of the upcoming exhibition of Roberta Debernardi aka HANA Trieste at EContemporary Gallery.

The exhibition invokes the essentiality of words and things as in Japanese art and culture much loved by the artist. The viewer will get in touch with his or her emotions in an intimate way in a garden of delicate imaginary flowers manually assembled with oriental meticulousness using only paper, glue, and wire.

As someone has already written on another occasion, «Hana can ‘transmute’ reality into a fantastic botany, a perennial bloom of ever-changing small works of art, unique pieces to be given to the time that graciously touches them». Hana Trieste's floral compositions become in some cases almost small works of Ikebana thanks to interesting grafts of linear wooden bases created exclusively for the exhibition by the Trieste workshop “Blu di Prussia” to achieve an arrangement in which instinct, emotionality, and creativity converge.

Roberta Debernardi, for years devoted herself to pictorial restoration and textile design, obsessively passionate about using her hands, after creating fabric flowers she stumbled (almost by accident) upon crepe paper, a material she had never considered until then, and says «a world opened up to me». She watched tutorials, read what she could find on the subject, made an unspecified series of tests to learn the various techniques, and started to learn about paper and this is where the fun part began.

She later stopped watching tutorials and started looking at flowers, discovering their complexity.  She uses all weights of crepe paper from Cartotecnica Rossi finding the ideal paper for the pistils and the perfect one for the petals, depending on the effect she wants to achieve, she colors it with markers, dry crayons and alcohol inks to give depth to the flower, she uses only vinyl glue and as a structure florists' wire, the thin kind that allows her to curve the stem and corolla and make them as natural as possible, she prefers small flowers and sprigs that she invents taking inspiration from flowers she sees in reality and botanical prints. She chose the name Hana, which means flower in Japanese giving her deep love for Japanese aesthetics and culture, of which flowers are a very important part, and she added the name of the city Trieste, where she lives and works.

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Roberta Debernardi, aka Hana-Trieste. Iwanu Ga Hana
curated by Elena Cantori in collaboration with Start cultura

November 18, 2022 - January 21, 2023
Opening on Friday, November 18, 2022 from 5 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

Galleria EContemporary
Via Crispi 28, Trieste