For Cattai it is rather that of exploring the possible horizons of meaning of the material and its sculptural transformations, finding therein the original ‘formativity’, and above all a deep relationship with the natural in a supremely expressive dimension. With the series Cortecce, the mature results of brooding that has witnessed fundamental phases in Aquamarina, Aquavariegata, Fasce, Screziati, Laguna, in a word, the successive and interconnected declinations of Canneto, Cattai definitively finds herself, and no longer with any purely aesthetic hesitation, in the lyrically felt dimension of life that characterizes the deep visual experience of anyone who is Venetian at heart. Color is the absolute protagonist here, the impure and sumptuous game of transparencies that amplifies the inexactness of the structure of the vase and offers, at the same time, a sort of appearance, and an interpretation, a two-dimensional one as well, as a pattern of bewildering and imperfect pathways. In some points the color is opaque, it withholds and diversely reflects the light: we are, here, in a territory that is openly pictorial, in which what counts is the horizontal distribution of the tones, that overlapping as well as transpiring, a different and no less free economy of chromatic relationships.
Cattai, in other words, thinks of and makes glass, but she does so skilfully en peintre. The generically cylindrical shape of the vases is in itself indifferent, it communicates nothing other than its task as a bearer of color and a generator of transparencies: in short, it has nothing to do with the obsession with objecthood that directed and influenced a great deal of minimalism and post-minimalism, to the extent that it, too, became an essential component of design. All this artist wants is for the appearance of the vase to point to a confident natural filigree, that it should be, in other words, the most pertinent in the game of transparencies and opacities that Cattai arouses in her pictorial dealings. Another aspect that clearly emerges in these works is the fundamental an-aesthetic that the artist is a bearer of. An-aesthetic, that is to say, the fundamental indifference to the complacency of the viewer’s gaze, from the moment that Cattai, as she works, is totally immersed in the flux of procedures – the technical process of glassmaking involves inescapable rituals, technical stages, and times whose mastery is totally absorbent, so that expression, for her, is a truly totalizing condition. Her works cannot be described as “beautiful” based on the usual canons: they are much more, and especially very different, from that.