Annamaria Russo is well-known for her many works which convey a memorable feeling of nature which is consolidated in that sediment of sand and colour that animates her canvasses with perpetual metamorphoses. It is a question of existential continuum, a common feature of Italian abstractism of the 50's exemplified by the work of such artists as Capogrossi, Sanfilippo, Tancredi, l'Accardi (through the use of signs), and naturalists such as Moreni, Morlotti, Mandellli (pure matter). If we take a closer look at some of the first works of Annamaria Russo from the 60's: Casagrande, 1968 and Natura morta e bambola (Still life with a doll), 1968, we see that organic matter is a primary element in her compositions, as if the artist is unable to avoid giving physical traces to her mixture of colours, that always transpire coupled with a strong chromatic style (derived in part from the past experiences of the Roman School). She has perpetuated this style with persistence up to her most recent paintings; in these the sedimentation thickens further and produces an abundant predominance of colour which absorbs and reflects the luminosity produced by the silicon of the sand which sparkles in a homogenous manner.
Her most recent "Wheels" have been conceived through this evolution of her work. They strengthen the expansive sense of the image, nullifying the horizontal and vertical significance of the traditional representation, so that the sensation of continuum of the colour mass (v. Ruota blu, 1994) (Blue wheel) does not have a precise direction, nor a single point of view. Naturalism that becomes an interior state, a state of mind, impression-expression, even when the artist meditates on the genesis of contemporary art (v. Ruota "Omaggio a van Gogh", 1994) (Wheel "Homage to Van Gogh). It is a spiritual gesture towards her natural self those vivid and strong colours that she applies, particularly when she finds herself in the presence of classic works of art such as those conserved in the Museo Barracco of Rome. Annamaria moves among these antique sculptures and scrutinizes them for their expressive power and she produces a direct testimony of this in a series of drawings and engravings of rapid and sensitive emotion. It is remarkable that from the pieces of cold marble and dark granite of these archeological relics she is inspired to produce sketches of lively pastel colours, following the principal of impression-expression, with which she analyses with the same spontaneity la Sfinge di Hat-Scep, l'Erma di Pericle, or the Stele sepolcrale attica. Her strokes are dynamic, the outline of the figures is pure and simple, but even so every trace of colour is born from a spiritual and interior conception of art resulting from her unique informal abstract experimentation.