STANZE (Rooms) | Paola Fonticoli

S T A N Z E (R O O M S)

Paola Fonticoli

Text by Maria Nadotti
Edited by Claudia Ponzi

A C C O S T A R S I

event with Maria Nadotti, Paola Fonticoli

Opening 7.05.24 h18-21
Dal 8.05.24 fino al 14.06.24


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Curated by Claudia Ponzi
A restless balance accompanies the gaze along sharp and, at times, almost hilarious lines. In this solo exhibition entitled “Stanze (Rooms),” Paola Fonticoli creates a succession of environments in which paper is the absolute protagonist. Essential, ironic, precise and elegant abstractions in which collage and minimal pictorial gestures build rarefied but poetry-dense worlds. I minuscoli ambienti creati dentro scatole riciclate o il respiro più ampio del bianco (o del nero) che si dilata indisturbato su vaste superfici, ci offrono un’ampia varietà di geometrie insolite e silenti, sempre in bilico e pronte al “passo falso”, liricamente protese verso luoghi da scoprire.
L’artista a volte si serve di materiali di scarto che rinascono diventando cosmi evanescenti e sospesi.

TRASPARIRE
Text by Maria Nadotti

Quando un’opera artistica si accasa sul limine dell’impercettibile, le coordinate spaziali cominciano a muoversi e la materia a svariare. We are welcomed into a field of silence and light. That’s why I would like to invite the reader into Paola Fonticoli’s atelier and to ask themselves how and where that limit is set, inside or around the artwork, and in that mysterious elsewhere in which the memory of the senses – the artist’s and ours – places it and then displaces it constantly. The artist’s most recent works – the soul’s and mind’s landscapes, as fleeting as the paper they are made of and as non-fading as past time’s trails and the clues of the future – invite you with gentle firmness to assume a complex sensorial posture, never unique and surely not unidirectional. Here, to see, first of all you have to listen, feel, debark the already seen, remember, doubt, question, look, go around, look again, get closer, get further, change point of view. And, first of all, accept not the misleading non vagueness of shadow, but its solidity, its being home. Paola Fonticoli draws sharp and permeable outlines – a paradox that shadow allows, offering itself as a never static zone of possibility, alluding to the inconsistent process of becoming – and does that by cutting and unifying, juxtaposing shapes and colors as to highlight that only disparity and and dissonance relate.

Her paper Rooms rigorously contained in small orphan boxes are micro-installations that seem to happen at the outskirts of sight. He who looks is witness to an evolution that happens inside of them, but that only the atmosphere in which they are immersed can activate. It’s an evolution similar to the one we witness when looking close and long to a blade of grass on the edge of a field or the making and unmaking of clouds in spring or the movement of light between a tree’s leaves: everything moves in matter’s tenacious work. Tangle, friction, attrractin, fusion, meeting: from there stems – exactly because without an objective that preceeds or ascends it – that tertium that in nature and art is always given and however waits to be seen, discovered recognized. Paper – the material on which Fonticoli has landed on through a succession of spoliations, going from the resistant lightness of wood to the ductile compactness of clay, to the inconsistency of clay diluted in water and used as varnish to the transparency of glass – other than being a fully fragile signifier, lets silence and light become physical matter of the artwork.

In this triadic intertwining act the hand, eye and ear of an artist that puts themselves between the void enclosed in every perimeter (canvas, page, box or other delimited surface) end the void that wraps it, between their mutual inside and their reciprocal outside, between the closed and the opened, the concealed and the exposed, the limited and the widespread and on the allusive edges of a shadow that gives and takes width from space. In the boxes created during these months by Fonticoli there is an accurate and subtly sensual study of what happens inside a finished territory, chosen and at the same time endured, that is there to be a barrier, obstacle and stumbling block, but also to offer the protection and reassurance of the limit and suggest strategies of coexistence, cohabitation and collaboration. Some tiny boxes are actual optical devices: they invite you to look through a layering of planes that puts into question perception, the certainty of perception and induces to ask if what is seen is all that is visible or whether there is a beyond, hidden behind the mutability and opacity of the apparent. The papers overlayed and glued together, without altering the color, working on the perception gap manufactured by their concretion, by the juxtaposition of the clippings, by their shaping, by those light marks that the artist traces by marker on the recto or verso of the sheet, generating minuscule fluctuating and windy universes of which you struggle to admit the real dimension. As if the artist had used a shrinking glass to give a measurement to breath.

And of the breath her Rooms have the rythm, the duration, the pauses, the intervals, the muffled sound, calm, kind. The act of composing has an acoustic and temporal outcome: the gesture of the hand persists through impersistence. Light laps paper, it floods it, it hides it, it frays it and breaches into it. The edges have become the center and the center has migrated to the edges. The game is serious here, and the rule is an intact and renewed astonishment.
Looking brings closer.

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