I met Susanne almost by chance in Cosenza after more than thirty years, during which the tenuous thread of communication was kept alive, as our lives progressed, by occasional meetings, however sporadic, with my colleague and friend Furio, her husband, who was like me also constantly travelling around the world.
We originally met many years ago in London during the certainly most important phase of a person’s life, the phase in which you design and start constructing your professional and emotional future and those important choices that will then decisively condition our lives are taken. Then we continued meeting in Rome, in times of marriage, children, work and building up our careers. But, as it often happens, at some point our paths, drawn by different professional interests, took different directions.
To see Susanne after such a long time in my city, Cosenza, as part of the beautiful Artist in Residence program BoCs Art, strongly advocated by our talented Mayor Mario Occhiuto, was an unexpected joy for me. I found the Susanne I left many years ago, with her usual extraordinary curiosity, with her sensitivity, with her always positive approach to life, with her insatiable desire to see new things and understand the world around her, all qualities that she has always managed to convey in her works.
Despite the long years passed from our last encounter, I have found that Susanne has remained the ‘pure’ artist, endowed with an unusual sensibility that she has been able to translate into art show-
ing reflections of her emotions and the sensations of the moment, far from pursuing commercial objectives. Her long morning walks, together with her inseparable backpack, in search of new places and new inspirations, have made her know Cosenza, for her a new place, a southern city she immediately loved and appreciated. So different from Wuppertal, her birthplace.
It was a joy for me to ‘share’ with Susanne the places most dear to me and a source of pride, her enthusiasm for a city she did not know and expected, I imagine, very different and less ‘welcoming’ than the one she discovered.
I am certainly not able to embark on an art critical discussion of her works, I do not have the competence and any evaluation of mine would be hardly credible. I can say, however, that I am extremely happy that these new works have found inspiration from the places most dear to me and in which I spent my childhood.
This is why I can only be grateful, in the hope that the line, that in her artistic inspiration has ‘united’ the various places of Cosenza, will also be the one that will keep us close in the years to come.
Preface out of book “Ulysses in Cosenza”, 2018
Text of the scholar Prof. Dr. Beniamino Quintieri, Rome for the Book “Susanne Kessler – Ulysses in Cosenza”, 2018