Paola Pezzi

Galleria Cà di Frà, Milan
Through October 20

Standing in front of the work of Paola Pezzi, it is easy to determine what we are looking at, but not so easy to decide whether the traits it displays are more closely related to painting or to sculpture.

Pezzi’s early works were clearly manifestations of plastic manipulation: the artist buried, unearthed, bandaged, and recomposed objects to create enigmatic expressions of fossil life. Pezzi’s later works in the same vein were embellished with pictorial effects and new gestures—smearing, the re-working of fabrics or of colored strips—emerged in her work. Pezzi’s fascination with color gradually became an obsession she had to indulge and, allowing herself to be led along by this inexorable impulse, she betrayed the essential rule according to which artists must seek to develop an intransigent style, the hallmark for which their signature stands.

Alongside the artist’s recent pieces, the exhibition displays those from the period during which Pezzi opened up her studio to reveal the tricks employed in her work, illustrating items from her “workshop”—utensils and objects from her everyday life—onto the two-dimensional surface of the canvas.

In keeping with her early works, Pezzi’s latest pieces contain a three-dimensional element and, like her second series, embrace a keen colorist component. In these latest works, however, Pezzi somewhat thickens the plot. By displaying the tools of her creative process—wax crayons, and pencils, molded together and hung on the wall—alongside golf balls stuffed with brightly-hued, laddered nylon tights and patchwork cloths stuck one on top of the other, occasionally interspersed with layers of cork, she creates particular visual games and pictorial effects. These succeed in going beyond painting, but do not quite arrive at the three-dimensional manipulation of sculpted forms.

These are almost “packaged” works, comprising Pezzi’s former artistic explorations. The canvas acts as an inescapable passage, the crossing of which has now lead the artist to arrive at a convincing equilibrium of color and form, the constant subtext of her present work. This new variety in Pezzi’s work rebels against the slightest previous diversion, establishing a basis for renewed growth.




Milovan Farronato
Translation by Rosalind Furness