Paola Pivi

Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris
Through October 20

Paola Pivi’s principal intention is to highlight the absurd aspects of reality, which she accomplishes by means of visually emphasizing ordinary objects, particularly those emblematic of our daily context.

In 1996, for example, the Italian artist made a construction out of biscuits used like Lego pieces, ironically and playfully creating a fragile and scented architecture. In the 1998 exhibiton Fuori Uso (Out of Order) held in Pescara’s Fruit Market, she installed an enormous truck, which she flipped over onto its side. A comparable idea was at work in the piece Fiat G91, an upturned military airplane, impotent in its isolation, which imposed itself on the attention of the visitors to the 1999 Venice Biennale. At the Castello di Rivoli the following year, Pivi exhibited a work that, rather than conceptually undermine the power inherent in instruments of destruction, imbued an obsessive invasiveness into symbols of luxury. The work was indeed like an over-abundant necklace of artificial pearls, thousands of them, capable of simultaneously fascinating and assaulting the viewer.

The artist has created differing versions of this concept, one of which is on view at her first Parisian solo show. Here the artist displays an new interactive installation that, although it seems to differ from previous presentations, in truth incites once again the same perceptive ambivalence that simultaneously triggers both attraction and repulsion.

The construction is a cylindrical structure, made up of innumerable nylon wires which stand vertically and to which are attached nails, whose points are turned towards the visitor. When these are approached, sensors are activated that make all the tips shift in one collective threatening movement. The fragility of the structure and the delicacy of the movement itself, however, seem to restrict the action and thus negate the potential aggression in the act.




Francesco Poli
Translation by Amanda Coulson