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Ann Craven’s painting is more than just cenceptual, it is also psychoanalyti­cal; in her canvases, the American artist enacts a deconstruction of her existence, starting from a highly recognizable im­age and arriving at a complex simplifica­cation of serial forms in which the subject is repeated as a mantra.

Craven begins exorcising her feelings of neglect and loneliness by endlessly depicting iden1ical couples of lovebirds. These inseparable, beautiful animals, standing on a flowered background – a mix of a kitsch wallpaper and Japanese engraving-create a familiar icon that is easy for everyone to understand and and appreciate.

Decomposing the figures through a process of abstraction, a striped pattern emerges, leaving just the chro­matic spectrum used for the figurative image on the surface, like an irregular rainbow standing as a nostalgic mental souvenir of an intimate sense of love and belonging.

Dismembering the neat order of the plain, juxtaposed colors, Craven violent­ly reaches a deep chaos through brutal self-analysis, separating each shade in singular, cluttered vortex – called “pal­ette”-thus creating a sampler of mental states and emotions.

Craven walks backwards down the Freudian path through the psyche, exploring the critical and moralizing function of the Super-Ego first, moving then to the organized realistic part of the Ego and finishing in the uncoordinated instinctual trends of the Id.
-Guia Cortassa