STATEMENT
My work focusses on the exploration of landscape through painting. That is the way I have been developing works of art along the recent years: silence, emotions, perception and memories are part of the setting as if they were any other geographic element of the whole. Landscape created as the result of an alienating inner process , more than the representation of vivid and real places.
The work of art happens between lights and shadows, between presence and absence, evoking the horizon as an attempt to meditate about my own existence, my feeling and my deep look into the inner self. Through the meditative use of several layers, some colorful, some diffused , the work of art is between the strong and the intimate, with the perception of something that really occurred or is about to occur.
The resulting image refers to an intimate universe of indefinite edges, is it possible for us to be immersed there and somehow become territory, closeness, shelter or abyss and at the same time come out unharmed?
"Deep Space".
/ On the works of Paula Picciani.
Darkness reigns, and suddenly flashes of greenish light highlight the only event that is taking place: the drift of floating pieces of a scrapped scenery
"Deep Space".
/ On the works of Paula Picciani.
Darkness reigns, and suddenly flashes of greenish light highlight the only event that is taking place: the drift of floating pieces of a scrapped scenery that acquires momentary clarity in its perpetual flight towards an uncertain destination through outer space.
Around him the undifferentiated extends, where it does not matter above or below, the more here than the beyond; and it is only the presence of those projected and opposed planes that opposes the only contrast to the background light.
Space is chaotic and incomprehensible, and our consciousness manages to add just a pinch of order and meaning to its quantum soup.
A point, for example, is not something that really exists. Since, strictly speaking, a point is an immaterial entity, it is practically nothing, just a coordinate, an almost non-existent reference where two divergent lines fleetingly cross.
A line can come from nowhere and go forever away towards an endless horizon.
And infinity can also be found not only in the distance but in the endless fractions into which a millimeter can be divided. In any rule, between zero and one there is an eternity.
And what about the voluptuousness that space adopts in our dreams? Where the laws that govern our physical world take vacations and then we think we can fly, we go through tiny holes, we make majestic leaps, or we fall and fall and fall without stopping.
Science has deconstructed our spatial experience to such an extent that, if we had to previously measure the countless physical, bodily, atmospheric, and gravitational variables that come into play at every slightest gesture, taking a step would be an almost impossible task.
There were those who strove to write practical instructions on how to go up or down a ladder, an act so automatic that we no longer remember when we learned how to do it.
Without our senses space is impossible.
Just by closing our eyes we access an intimate universe of indefinite contours. We listen to space every time distant bells reach us or whisper in our ears.
We savor the space when we feel with our eyes the aroma of the ripe fruit that hangs from the tree.
Our senses project vectors into space, which detect it, frame it, measure it, verify it and understand it.
They make it a real experience.
Space becomes territory, closeness, a refuge or an abyss.
The space of love, with its appointments and hiding places, rubbing and shaking, cuddling and concavities.
A frozen or boiling space, dense or loose, empty or suffocating.
Inhabited by a door that closes and a window that opens,
by a comet or a dome,
by the wall and the threshold,
by the nebula, the hummingbird, the cloud or the rocket.
Conceived by fantasy,
suffered in confinement,
reconstructed by memory,
made flesh in privacy,
Logic, calculation, loss, debauchery.
Mariano Vilela, 2019
CHARCO GROUP PRESENTS:
PASSENGER IN TRANCE
Verónica Leprêtre and Paula Picciani
Many of those who are attracted to the artistic life
They are desperately searching for those reservoirs of silence
where we can take root and grow.
Mark Rothko
The numerous sound or musical metaphors that we use to understand the visual arts seem to suggest that images are not only creatures of space and the physical but also participate in time, which is one of the subjects of music. The works that are part of this exhibition are silent, insinuating and of powerful subtlety. There is a musical genre called ambient whose search is for climates, spaces and atmospheres rather than rhythmic structures, harmony and melody. Pasajera en Trance is an exhibition that could be framed within a diffuse and fictional movement: ambient art.
In Verónica Leprêtre's photographs, soft lights and shadows are portrayed that suggest minimal volumes, still but loaded with veiled dynamism. Arranged in this polyptych they take on another meaning. The sequence, the minimal heterogeneity of the variants between each photo, propose a temporality. As if the work were the map of the paths of the gaze and each photo captures a moment of that journey, a visual log of a minimal and at the same time profound journey. The storyboard for a dream.
Paula Picciani's paintings are landscapes, although there is no geographical or territorial element in them. Only an imprecise, non-existent horizon, tempered by a mist that creates a strange atmosphere. The atmosphere is that of metaphysical surrealism. Despite its minimalism, it is loaded with psychology and evokes sensations that are also hybrid and vanishing. In these works everything is uncertainty. A discovery: the framing denies us even the certainty of the rectangle. The corners of the painting have also disappeared.
The large-format works are accompanied by a group of sketches and small works that further demonstrate the communicating vessels that exist between both artists and in which the process and drifts of which their visions are composed can be guessed.
The exhibition is completed by a site-specific installation that summarizes the spirit of Passenger in Trance in a subtle and poetic alchemy: the light, the soft, the uncertain, the still, the atmospheric, the suspension of time.
A verse from the song from which we borrow the title says “A real love, it's like sleeping and being awake.” In that transit, in that sleep, the works in this exhibition live.
Laura Saint-Agne and Kalil Llamazares
CURATORS
Buenos Aires, December 2023