Paola Angelini’s painting in Venice
The Ca ‘Pesaro Project room becomes the setting for a pictorial experiment in progress, the result of the dialogue between the artistic language of Paola Angelini and the collection of the Venetian museum.
Looking to the past with today’s eyes is one of the most insidious challenges that human beings have to face. If it is an artist doing it, the reading levels become complicated, showing the side to the risk of slippery overlapping and mocking interpretative lightness.
However, this is not the case with Paola Angelini (San Benedetto del Tronto, 1983) which, resorting to a solid pictorial system refined over the years, is measured with the collection of the International Gallery of Modern Art in Venice, transformed by the artist into his temporary “studio” in October 2020. Closed to the public, Ca ‘Pesaro thus becomes for Angelini a testing ground and a source of inspiration, a creative spring and perhaps a limit from which to free oneself. The outcome of this dialogue is anything but silent Splendor Solis, the large canvas set up in the Project room of the Venetian exhibition venue, which seems to translate the transversal planes along which the museum collection develops into colors and lines. “It is a work that I have left open, unwanted unfinished, a painting in the making that can accommodate different thoughts, reflections and notes on figuration, composition and pictorial matter. I chose to continue it and conclude it in the museum, where this phase of study began”Explains Paola Angelini.
PAOLA ANGELINI’S PAINTING
Hieratic and full figures alternate with almost sketchy presences that observe a plane only partially invaded by shadow, on which sculptural texts and a recumbent figure, asleep, find space. The past becomes the material of the contemporary, without however being swallowed up by it, in a work in progress which, for the duration of the exhibition, changes the physiognomy of the canvas, day after day. Work on the present by keeping the past firm and questioning it: this seems to be the sub-text of Angelini’s work, which does not fall into the easy trap of homage, but moves gracefully on a slippery limit, incorporating in this operation also the public, who crosses, unaware, the threshold of a studio artist in the heart of a museum full of history.
I Arianna Testino