Although the art of Charlotte Ritzow dates back to recent times, it would be wise to avoid an overly simplistic judgement of her works, which may be a temptation due to her young age and amateur status.
Her poetic expression, in fact, has its roots in an experimental world, learnt in her homeland, Germany, where she studied profoundly and thoroughly the art of the palette.
Her work in Italy, and thus in different environmental conditions, reveals a certain intermingling of learning – that which accompanies the precepts of the painting ‘profession’ – and elements of the magical-expressive dimension.
Charlotte Ritzow is a liberated European painter. On the level of figure narration she betrays no nordic, expressionist nostalgia. Her works, indeed, present a consistent solarity which is undeniably Mediterranean.
The creation of ‘Spiaggia’ (Beach) brings to the fore the work of a skilled painter having the ability to blend her own narrative ideas with the delightfulness of the subject matter. It is a bright work: the white sail on the horizon signals and signifies light, which floods the canvas abstractly, composed of variations of deep and light blues.
Due to her naturally contemplative character, this young artist is mainly inclined towards a visionary, figurative-informal art, with an intimacy which concentrates on a concoction of memories and unconscious sensations.
We can imagine how her first instructive environment – that of the art classrooms of her native country – did not in the least alter her tendency to respect her own oneiric and essential visions, indeed, to abandon herself to them through the beauty of visual poetry.
Charlotte Ritzow has the gift of being able to draw out of each painting the greatest possible clarity, in a forging of meanings which bear witness to her strong creative personality.
This can be seen in ‘Tramonto’ (Sunset), an impelling, atmospheric painting of beautiful composition. Ritzow appreciates the similar themes portrayed by Nicolas De Stael, on permanent exhibition in the Castle of Antibes, and succeeds without doubt in capturing the same sensitivity of colour which sweeps horizontally across the backgrounds in variations of black, yellow and orange. 
The intimist accent defines and enhances the artist’s perception of the constantly transfigured world of fairytale and myth. She demonstrates a perpetually lucid state of mind by her use of allusive colours in plays of simplification. Her unique sea-greens, with their vibrant chromatism, are a perfect expression of the innerly contemplative spirit of the artist.
They bear witness to a strong need to exalt her own imaginative personality, as can be seen in ‘Solitudine’ (Solitude), in which a pure white sail, symbolising the theme of the painting, seems a defenceless monologue, alone among the bright, gigantic waves of a blue sea. The whole painting is an exultant call to open spaces, which evoke a controlled emotional charge.
The young painter believes passionately in her own profession as narrator of abstract feelings, devoted to the invisible and its materialisation on the canvas.
Her present (and, I am certain, also her future) artistic personality is determined by a total autonomy, with respect to the contemporary artistic trends of so-called “young art”. She avoids, in fact, medial art, brut art, conceptualism, choosing instead the more pleasant tendencies towards an assorted world, lunar or semi-abstract, in a lyrically figurative allusivity. This can be seen in ‘Luna galleggiante’ (Floating Moon), in my opinion, one of her most important compositions, where her understanding of colour as a linguistic expression comes across perfectly. The painting, in fact, is a constant play of tones and counter-tones: the yellow moonlight which blends with variations of deep blue and anthracite black and grey, the starry sky as a lyrical palette of white dots heralding the silence of night… Contemplating this work, it is possible to sense, and individuate, the many disguises that a personal dream may take on. Ritzow uses those of childhood, bizarre, extravagant, with their eternal elements of expected magic and veiled, melancholic happiness, as in the case of ‘Il faro di Hiddensee’ (The Lighthouse of Hiddensee), in which a broad, atonal strip of naphtol carmine red overhangs a landscape in the dark green of  Hooker.
The artist’s landscapes appear at times poetically vague, nictating. Charlotte Ritzow, in fact, is somewhat like her paintings. She sails alone through her personal fairytales and myths and the warm splendour of her colours, the definite precision of her chromatic orchestrations, leaving no room for misinterpretation or confusion.
With the pantheistic representation of the great oak tree in the impessive composition entitled ‘Energy’, the image of Nature appears to transform itself into an intensely fauvist expressivity, living in a sphere which has nothing of the ‘real’, the tangible.
It must be emphasised that Ritzow occupies a singular place on the stage of young European art. She is equally distant from the irrational flights of fancy of the recent avant-guarde and from the idleness of a figuration which no longer seems to want to narrate genuine poetry. Charlotte Ritzow, on the contrary, is an artist who defends to the extreme her own particular mode of evoking the dream-dreamer, who continually finds new expression on the canvas.
We can appreciate her ingenious freedom both of improvisation (see ‘Il cigno’ (The Swan)) and of the formal definition of a spellbound candour. Her judgement of the age she lives in is pleasantly detatched. In every composition there is a rejection of the dramatic, of anxiety, distress, while the world of her fantasies is blended together with the ideals of a futuristic dream, where one day, hopefully, peace will reign.
At times, we find in the figures hints of early 1900 painting (see ‘Il bacio’ (The Kiss)), which Ritzow inevitably carries, like a creative and renewing sap, in her blood.
The dream, which transfigures both nature and the human figure (sometimes with a nightmare quality interpreted in a slightly ironic key, as in ‘La vendetta’ (The Revenge)), adds further emphasis to the aspect of narration as an exquisitely surreal game, perceptible in the mobility of the figures and the emblematic fixedness. What in fact do the female figures of Charlotte Ritzow portray, if not the emptiness of existence? What becomes of them? Where they are present in her paintings, they appear as figures in an attitude of allarm, provoking in the observer a subtle irritation by their theatrical, grotesque appearance.
In reality, it is above all the sea, with its blue sky, that represents the true backcloth of her poetic world. Charlotte is, in actual fact, a kind of Alice sailing happily through her Wonderland.