artist

‘04 . ROJO EVENTS / Milan . Roma . Barcellona
‘05 . HYPEGALLERY / Milan . Amsterdam
‘06 . FESTIVAL FILOSOFIA / Sassuolo (RE)
ROJO-REVISTA - everything unfolds, 03/’04 / www.revista-rojo.com
Collettiva “SCUCITI LA BOCCA” - Magazzini Criminali - Sassuolo . 09.’06
Collettiva “COSA TI SEI PERSO” - Magazzini Criminali - Sassuolo . 06-07.’08

magazzini criminali

THE UNSPEAKABLE

In the contemporary universe there exist very closed forms of art. This unavailability to comprehension often doesn’t hide anything, apart from a mannerist void. Fortunately, the syndrome of vacuity is recognizable by instinct, thanks to the bad feelings which leaves.
Irritation first of all.
But sometimes, the difficulty of decryption of a work of art’s code hides something mysterious.
And in that case it attracts us, it speaks in an unknown language, it circulates around us like an electric fluid. It defies and captivate us, and we must to understand. That’s the same mechanism which creates for an object of love, or during a treasure hunt in riddles. Because objects of love are contradictory, and puzzles proceed by paradoxes.
The first paradox of Andrea Paganini is style: one would expect a clean, linear, figurative art from a professional graphic designer. But for Paganini this is the exception, the way in which he portrays only his son Dario, in a delicate three-quarter.
His rule is rather the chaos, the mucking-up, the absence of structure.
The shapelessness.
Paganini uses bitumen, ash, linen-oil, kaolin, rust, fire. The matter at its primary state, superimposed, scratched, mixed in a range of half organic half aleatory colours and impressions.
A tyre becomes the halo of a Madonna which seems a votive bust of 10.000 years ago, or maybe the False Maria, the she-robot created by the mad doctor of Metropolis. A dairy cloth transforms in a net which separates us from a red embossed circle. It could be the sun, the nucleus of a cell, or the abstract idea of god.
Paganini’s last series is characterized by the use of white. Often juxtaposed to or mingled with black, in thick and grained strokes. Curdled by pokes in the shape of a skull. Or in big bitten canvases, literally made up from under the artist’s feet, from the tarpaulin used to keep the floor clean. This work in particular seems to come out from the outside, it could be a panel which has been exposed to bad weather for years.
The works of Paganini often give this impression, to be not produced by the hand of a man, but by the intervention of chance and by the course of events. They are emblem of time, which spoils, makes forget, covers with sand. Time changes everything, and memory is the only shield against this devastating action.
The one which fixes recollections of an African summer, and of a boat which becomes a big insect-shaped animal in a wood made of black flows, surrounded by the white splendour of heat.
Or funny memories of black cats, so much recidivous in the kleptomania of someone else’s food to deserve a painting.
The memory of La Bête by Borowczyk, a traumatic vision at the thresholds of adolescence, to be exorcised by employing the VHS tape as support, painted with the black of disappointment, crowned with a white squirting.
Paganini ciphers his memories with an economy of expressive elements which becomes an armoured cryptogram, impregnable without his intervention. He communicates with a primitive, bare, obscure sign.
Recurring symbols appear in the amorphous matter.
The vertical stroke, often brown, as a gore, as dry blood. A laceration, often with suture stitches. A sore which becomes a door to go to another side.
Then a shape with rounded lines, curled up, biologic. A bean, or maybe a foetus. Or also a stylized head. Sometimes featureless, sometimes in the act of screaming. More or less sharp.
The sharpest of all is the one in 4717. The visitation of a dead of the same blood, a ghost inside a dream.
Who returns, speaks, and makes little presents.
And then turns into the picture of a frogman.
Someone who goes deep below the surface, in a silent, dark world, in the search of something which few people would be able to search.
Something beyond appearances, beyond passing-by forms, beyond clear-cut divisions.
Something unspeakable.

Luiza Samanda Turrini
Editing: Rachele Cinarelli

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