LE DEE DENTRO
di Alessandro Riva

There is a sort of vertigo that accompanies Paola Gandolfi's work. It is the same vertigo that accompanies an entire universe,that universe that until the end of the nineteen century,when philosophers and thinkers belonged only and strictly to the male gender,was disdainfully defined by a plethora of terms the perhaps most bland and by far the kindest of which was "feminine Hysteria". Surely the universe around which Paola Gandolfi's paintings,all of them,rotate is a universe that has its theoretical basis in the work of some writers and intellectuals who have worked at length on the psychic, in particular on the relationship between psychoanalysis and feminine identity, to begin with Julia Kristeva, that strange, genial and unusual figure of intellectual and writer,whose contribution on the subject has been fundamental. Paola Gandolfi's paintings rotate around some cardinal concepts that Jean Shinoda Bolen, (another scholar who has been able to give original interpretations on feminine psychology) has summed up in a curious and intriguing book called "the goddesses inside woman": the idea that we must look for the so called mystery of behaviors defined (generally and often arrogantly) as feminine,inside thoughts and relations'
structures that have their basis in mythical dimensions and a series of
internal models and cultural archetypes that act on the woman's psyche from the inside, in an unconscious automatic,yet,equally, profound way. Those potential models that are present in every woman's psyche persist there as archetypes and like in ancient Greece , may ask for their due and demand control in alternate phases and always in an unconscious way on every woman's behaviour. Gandolfi's work presents itself in some way as parallel and complementary to psychoanalysis, as it confronts the unsolved knots of
identity (and feminine identity in particular)with a pick like kind of painting made up of ancestral elementary forms that have roots in images of our deep memory and cultural unconscious - images and symbols belonging to myths, ancient legends and history, but also to our darkest unconscious and our most ancient ancestral memory: images that almost only women artists, great artists like Louise Bourgeois or Marlène Dumas to give two significant examples , in a much better and freer way than their male colleagues, have known and know how to bring out and delineate in forms both simple and at the same time extraordinarily symbolic, almost as if acting through a sort of deep alchemical memory more than through the usual categories of sight and cold rational reasoning.
What Paola Gandolfi's sets in motion and brings into action inside her paintings are figures of mothers and ideal and material procreators of women ("woman begets woman" the painter has reminded us in many significant works) that today live the disturbing and terrible beginning of a millennium:they are the Athena, Artemide and Aphrodite or if you like the Clytemnestra, Antigone and Electra that have suffered, betrayed, cried and loved,in other words lived, century after century and tread after tread weaving the cloth and the structure of our western civilisation as we see and live today.
They are the mental and cultural archetypes of behaviours,dreams and obsessions that still today characterise the feminine psyche.They are the physical and psychological violence suffered, the constraints, contradictions,ties, indecisions ,doubts and uncertainties that every woman carries within herself. They are also the sweetness, securities, fires, double standards meant and unmeant,intelligence, analysis,,thousands of insignificant moments that weave the cloth of everydayness, precious intimate and perhaps unshareable night thoughts, and finally the obsessions, joys, secret and unconfessable divisions that every woman carries daily within herself.
"Through the gestures of hands, heads, bodies I try to recreate
those double meanings, psychic blockings,automations and unintentional gestures that we do everyday in order to recuperate the schizophrenic and divided parts of ourselves", said the artist and truly today those divided parts seem to speak to us , to smile and wink at us and to study us from the surface of the painting almost as if they had for the first time really taken life,body and blood thanks to an ancient and incomprehensible magic.