UNA CITTA' DIPINTA
di Marco Lodoli

I believe every artist has the same wish: to find the place, on the page,
canvas or in a violin, where thoughts and world can meet and recognize
themselves as brothers. That place is a thin rope bridge stretched over the void, an hesitation, a wind that stops and for a second almost takes form , and again becomes invisible. It seems to me that the whole of the artist work consists in preparing oneself to be there at that moment: to miss it is very easy, to distract oneself would almost be natural- and yet one lives every day of one's life in the hope that thought and world, soul and matter are not irreconcilable.
At times we are chased by the haughtiness of mind, at times we surrender to the arrogance of things: we lay on one bank or the other, where a thousand peculiar theories might justify a brake or a choice.
But the artist does not want nor love that partial choice: neither sad monk nor hammering blacksmith, neither in nor out: it is where opposites meet till they become one, it is in that simple and mysterious place that one would like to live, at least for a while, just the time to understand that a single breath fills both lungs and landscapes.
I believe this is just Paola Gandolfi's journey. Her women as big as
architecture mix with the city - or maybe it is the city , a Rome as
intimate as a room, to enter as a still wind into a skirt. Every dividing
wall has fallen but this does not mean that life could disappear in
surrealism, moving away in a balloon into the arbitrated skies of creation: not at all, women and neighborhoods merge in the peace of the painting, a painting that absorbs rough edges and sorrows, suburbs and secrets.
Everything is reassembled in the fixity of an intuition: one understands
that only a moment later women and streets will restart their separate ways, that thoughts and the world will continue to lose and seek each other like dogs and hares, like lovers; but for a second, in the best paintings, colors and lines embrace a unity.
In my stories i have tried to overcome the idea of a background in front of which to move the characters. Rome is neither behind the gestures nor around us: it is imagined by those gestures, built by those looks. It is not the real city but the city I have been able to recognize: twisted, suburban, noisy. If my conscience shall be clear and happier, I hope that my Rome shall be more beautiful.
And today while I cross the silent spaces of twentieth century buildings,
while I drive amongst the austere pillars of the super elevated road, and
even when I observe certain roman girls, solid and restless, it seems that my eyes glimpse in the city a new city, previously almost unknown to me, a Rome cut diagonally by the light of geometry and by the dismay of the heart: and this happens thanks to Paola's paintings.
On the other hand everybody starts a neighborhood with the colors he is able to, with the words he knows, everybody adds a street, a corner, tarmac and bricks as soft as dreams, the city and the mind become larger, closer.