“Her paintings are calm, seeming to have been painted at midday, following a silent and tenacious path until reaching a refined pictorial expression of color and matter, and an understanding of herself. The noble lines of her constructions reveal the starting point for the sensitive and the imaginary. Her houses are a fleeting motif for the ethereal, the untouchable, the sacred. Always managing to express herself in her varied work on the same theme, Clara Heteny reminds me of Goethe’s words: “Draw a circle around yourself and dig deep.”

ALBERTO GRECO, Argentine artist  – San Paolo – 1958

“…she stands out for her grace, for the clarity of her compositions, for this naive allusion to the reality in which she lives. The diluted tempera helps her to accentuate the delicacy of her themes with its transparencies.”

ELENA  POGGI – “El Nacional” – Buenos Aires – 1958

“… the beauty of the gentle colors, the delicate geometric composition and landscapes of her paintings remind me of Morandi, a painter who is very dear to me.”

PROF. KURT PINTHUS – Columbia University – 1961

“…these paintings impress with their unity of conception, reminiscent of the lessons of Carrà and Morandi. The simple, simplest of Italian architectural motifs, geometrically inserted into the surface of the painting, is delicately transformed, poeticized with restrained, luminous colors: a whisper of colors.”

K.D. – “Stuttgarter Nachrichten” – 1967

“Relationships between clearly geometric surfaces dominate the landscapes of painter Clara Heteny, exhibited at the Institute of Foreign Relations. Southern themes—villages, chapels, mills, boats—are represented in delicate colors, in objectively simplified compositions, suggesting an atmosphere of calm and balance. These compositions, which demonstrate remarkable pictorial qualities, never resort to figurative motifs: the penetratingly concentrated pictorial effect arises solely from the thing represented, especially house facades, seen from different perspectives.”

G.W. – “Stuttgarter Zeitung” – 1967

“At the Galleria Moroni, an exhibition of rare spiritual splendor. Clara Heteny is exhibiting, and we must admit that we have rarely been so completely captivated by a grace so detached from the burdens of reality, which is evoked only through transparencies and allusions, according to a barely hinted keyboard of themes that we find recomposed in music full of our soul.

It is the most solar and refined, most fantastic and yet most comprehensible, most ingenuous and most knowledgeable painting we have seen in recent years. Above all, there is a constructive essentiality that coincides with poetry, a gentleness that translates into a silent song, a reflection of distant lands that never has anything folkloric about it. It is a unity of conception, an organicity of dictation that makes each theme echo the other, just as the taste for geometry leads the images to mirror an abstraction that does not exclude narrative but has no need for words. It already has everything within itself in the delicate exaltation of transparencies, in the thread that unravels a purity of design, reduced to those eternal laws that are the soul of the harmony of things.

Clara Heteny’s originality therefore lies in her mastery of the subject, which is merely an opportunity to transcribe the reflection of an inner contemplation onto the canvas. The object—house, countryside, or village—is only the means of her message, refined like an indescribable instrument, which enhances the apparent poverty of the means with an incomparable and lasting richness of lyrical evocations and the chastity of language with a resonance of echoes that pursue us within ourselves as if they had emerged from the matrix of our words, unearthed from the immobility of infinite silences and brought to life by the unexpected wind of an unknown wing.

Clara Heteny’s painting is on such a high peak that it makes all convergences possible. In fact, never before have we felt the futility of distinctions between abstract and figurative painting and between pure criticism and criticism tainted by literary decadence as we do when faced with her paintings. Because the medium is authentic painting without other adjectives and the end is a moment of poetry that mirrors time outside of time. And this is what all the arts tend towards, even the art of the word.

Her originality lies in the rediscovery of a candor that immediately reveals itself as authentic and by virtue of which the low coloring derived from a palette without bright colors takes on a splendor that lies not so much in the intensity of the light as in the arcane suspension that her images evoke.

Her simplicity is an achievement of poetry, just as for the ancient mystics, the greatest treasure was the achievement of poverty.”

ALFIO COCCIA, art critic – Milano – 1967

Nothing is more accurate than the adjective “sunny” to describe Clara Heteny’s painting: a high sun, at its zenith, in a clear sky burns above rooftops and houses, blazing over deserted landscapes.

In her other works, however, the sun, present in its action, is visually absent. In these tempera paintings and drawings that the painter now presents to us, the “sun” itself has become the protagonist: the sun as a symbol of universal strength, the sun as a source of vital energy for everyone and everything, the sun as the wheel of time, the sun as the spiral of becoming.

We find ourselves faced with an emblematic vision whose mystery we must penetrate and whose message we must discover in order to be welcomed, to participate ourselves in this “sun-ness” as ancient as the universe and always new, vital, future.

Clara Heteny serenely takes us by the hand with her clear painting, with the clean touch of her precise brush, with the decisive mark of her graphic intuition, and brings us back, serene, from the shadows to the radiant light of the “sun.”

MAURO FRANCINI – Milano – 1972