RACHEL CITRINO

Citrino creates artwork grounded in the material of her life. She has developed a cosmology of symbols marking her path of exploration.

Citrino's work echoes symbols from much older image myths - the Etruscan, the pagan Celtic, the long-ago-lost. Ralph Stanley, the American singer-songwriter, talks about how he had to call back to the ancient keening, the high pitched wail that is no longer sweet but makes you shiver. Rachel Citrino also calls back to a deeper place.

Marks of her scratching are on the canvases. Beyond the first layer, these markings add a dimension reminding us that the image is never complete. Creating and collecting fragments - organic material, discarded detritus, digital images - she presents us with a piece of a puzzle, holds it up to the light, imagines a whole. It is the digging, the sifting through, that creates the aesthetic tension in her work. The process of uncovering is her deepest subject.

Citrino paints memory maps and practices a wild and joyful archeology. Only an artist who is so confidently alive can dig the earth and sift through memory shards with such feral certainty. As Citrino herself once said, "I want to use words that don't exist yet so in the meantime, I make visual art".

Excerpted from GROWING DOWN by Margie Strosser 2001