Gianluca Marziani Critico/curatore d'Arte Contemporanea

www.gianlucamarziani.com gianlucamarziani@mac.com

Edward Lucie Smith Paola Gandolfi Miriam Mirolla La recherche de Ma Mére Marco Lodoli Una città di dipinta Miriam Mirolla Macchina Madre Alessandro Riva Le idee dentro Gianluca Marziani Sculpture exercises (micro and macro)

SCULPTURE EXERCISES (MICRO AND MACRO)
di Gianluca Marziani

To walk around the arid surface of the heel, to direct oneself amongst the sinuous engravings of the sole, to entangle a way between the probing toes, to slide over the shapely nails...To climb over the sublime basis of the ankle, to move up along the tibia in order to dive into the fleshy softness of the calf, to stop over the rigorous seat of the knee, to climb up further into the ample geography of the scented thigh... To smell acrid smells, to move the erotic tension between the open legs, to lose one's bearings in the bracing forest that opens the passage into the absolute...To proceed along the muscular pleats of the abdomen, over the hilly belly and the dry lake of the navel...To waver between the soft hills of questioning breasts, around the gravitational system of the rigid nipples... To move the energy along tapering arms indicators of the stars' orientation... To climb between the fingers of very th! in hands, over neutrally coloured oval nails...To thrust one's fingers into the warming mass of hair, to stare into the passion of liquid eyes, to caress elastic lips...To go inside, to descend beyond the throat, to pass the threshold of the hidden organism, to discover the mountainous territories of the spirit, to find the undecided zones of consciousness, to capture the specular tensions that render the internal universe of femininity not to be missed..

Woman as the possible formulation of the ultimate.
Woman as the apotheosis beyond the limits of everyday experience.

Feminine territories between interior and exterior
Forms of the body as forms of the hidden world.
Paola Gandolfi's art recounts woman with an empathic attitude and a really masterly psychological complexity. But from here let us not limit ourselves to the psychoanalytical journeys that activate themselves through her iconography. At the same time I would like to avoid the easy ideological interpretations, th! e identity liberation's themes of a myopic feminism another rhetoric of enraged spinsters. Personally I am struck (in the mind and on the skin) by the artist's vibrant passion, the exacting attachment to her own nature, the intimate sense of the feminine condition in a society of often archaic (non)rules. In her art I perceive the demiurgic energy of the 'Universal Woman’, I feel the weight of an historic centrality of role beyond role. That does not mean a 'cult of reproduction' only, but a complex capability to govern reality's psychological and emotional reasons.

Woman as condition of the experience of self.
Sculpture as condition of the experience of form

. Following the coloured flow of drawing and painting, the best creative entropy takes us to Paola Gandolfi's plastic forms. Precisely to the huge sculpture and to the (micro) wearable sculptures of this project. An open journey along the guidelines of further expressive possibilities. That seem very akin to the visual co! des of her painting. Lets say that they become the completion of an elastic coming and going between body and mind, instinct and reason,power and duty, word and silence. From the white wall lilywhite arms protrude wearing the small sculpture for sensitive subjects. The sequence is arranged with the progressive movements of a progressive photo-dynamism: until the mini sculptures stop as perpetual flashes of golden light, a baroque dazzle saturated with spiritual charge and exposed nerves. The internal body’s culture is reborn in the rings, necklaces, bracelets, brooches, earrings and other sculptural forms: to be lived physically, psychologically, emotionally…
Ihave never used the term “jewels’, but WEARABLE SCULPTURES. Lets say,if we need to be reminded, that words have a solid specific weight and count very much both for story and content. A jewel presumes a project where an inorganic element (the jewel) is put on an organic element (the person). In gandolfiii,s’s case ever! y piece represents an organic grail that completes the vitality of the beneficiary. The forms are plastic projections of a live fragment that is superimposed on the person’s nerve points. A ring with finger’s details, elements that evoke the similarities between hair and electrical cables,the earring in the shape of a ear with a small diamond set in the lobe, the necklace made out of a sequence of arms, other body fragments, other ironic mutations of beauty…they are some of the infinitesimal points that join the exterior of the painted body and the interior of the distorted vision. We feel the plastic conscience of the wearable object, the moral value of its psychoanalytical volumes, the compressed power of the by now universal microform. Returning to painting, when the legs or the arms multiply themselves the power of the multiform interpretation stands out on the skin of the story. The same happens if we look at the specular bodies, the fragmentations of a single figure, t! he floating heads, the invading hair. Gandolfi reinvents the external dress through a dynamic and cerebral body ready to be moulded on the frequency of internal conditions. For a moment we see ourselves with the eyes of the artist, not appraising the impossible but the realistic deviations of a superimposition between mind and reality.

We can descend even further into the remote corner of feminine spirit, into the blinding meanders of pure instinct: where freedom crosses the danger of excessive courage, but where every distorted vision becomes plausible, realizable, in danger of being eliminated. We can descend to the lower floor of the gallery, into the amniotic sac of these silent sculptural exercises. A big ceramic woman floats in the gassy liquid of the underground. Split into pieces she appears into some re-connectable blocs, recreating the mental skin of the painted figures.It is Gandolfi’s first big sculpture: a perfectly succeeded exercise in integrating the bi-dimens! ional vision into the complex volume of matter. Lets imagine her as a mother that has produced the micro sculptures of the floor above. Her body is the body of the woman we search for, investigate, scrutinize, smell,touch, take…

Every fragment contains the whole of being.