English 
Italiano 
Cheerful is beautiful, cheerful is happy, cheerful is art.
And the joy of Nicoletta Belletti is contagious: she is carried by a clear laughter, bright colors, paintings that come out from the surface and invade the surrounding space with energy.
In the beginning there were only flowers, but not soft bouquets framed in small paintings in pastel colors… Nicoletta’s flowers are gigantic, they fill large panels (“I never had the white paper syndrome,” admits the artist smiling) and explode on dark or bright backgrounds that create a stark contrast with the tones of the petals. Contrast that is double and emphasized by the game between the glossy surface of the base obtained by vitrifying and mixtures of resin high relief that outline the subject and manage to give on the one hand the meaning of the gestures – almost as action painting – and on the other hand softness that no two-dimensional work would know how to create.
From flowers to animals, for Nicoletta, the step was short. From Emilia she could not help but get to know first of all with the pigs, with their funny faces with the round and pink nose, and then the sweet cows, ironic donkeys, dream jellyfish, portraits of pets that are often commissioned – the Indian blackbird or the bouffant poodle – complete with detailed accounts of the character of the creatures to help coming out life, and affections, behind the brush strokes. Just with animals, with the hens of “Io e le mie amiche” (“my friends and I”), Nicoletta Belletti has been selected for the Parma section of the Venice Biennale of 2011, curated by Vittorio Sgarbi.
Since then, the artist has never ceased to experiment, and his studio bears the traces, including cans and spray, newspaper clippings, and vases filled with fine gravel, and recently she tried to replace the resins with whipped cream, in a game between artistic painter and confectioners, and in recent months she has made “Compagni di Strada” (Road Fellows) in tribute to the shopkeepers of the street that houses his shop window, a series of photographic portraits of which has drawn baroque ornaments, Napoleonic clothes, fluttering birds and – inevitable – inflorescences of all kinds.
If art has the indisputable role of representing the emotions, the feelings, the reality, that of Nicoletta Belletti brings to the surface the light-heartedness that is within each of us, the desire to let go by the colors and soft shapes, scents that seem to come off from the pistils and eyes winking and smiling of our animal friends.
