Gea Casolaro

Galleria Estro, Padua
Through December 12

The exhibition Real/Fiction introduced a project developed by Gea Casolaro during the course of the last two years: photographic sequences illustrating daily events recorded in several European cities. The artist focuses on banal actions and visual cues picked up from the street, aligning these elements with a sensibility indebted to certain spy stories. Indeed, a predilection for crime novels emerges from the work; observing the “diptychs” and “triptychs” on show gave the impression of happening upon a film set.

With a demiurgic intention and voyeuristic spirit, the artist combines unrelated people and narratives into single images, furnishing each episode with a short caption that comments on the sequence of events and transforms every fragment of reality into fiction.

Works like Uscita a fare una passeggiata, viene riconosciuta da un passante, e torna velocemente sui suoi passi (Out for a walk, she is recognized by a passerby and turns hastily to retrace her steps) demonstrate how Casolaro’s examinations privilege the perception and interpretation of facts, to the detriment of objectivity.

By creating a novelistic structure for her works, the artist puts forward a skeleton on which observers can hang their own visions. This aspect was particularly evident in Lotta sotto occhi indifferenti, riuscendo, infine, ad attrarre l'attenzione (Struggle before indifferent eyes, succeeding, finally, to attract attention), in which a couple stretched out on the grass, engaged in an action that is open to interpretation, are apparently interrupted by a third party, the uncomfortable third wheel. Are they playing, cuddling, or fighting?

The situation vacillates between reality and fiction; anyone may take part by attaching a different title to the sequence, creating another tale within the tale. Casolaro’s work suggests that an objective and unidirectional vision of the facts does not exist, since “reality is always the projection of the visions that one has of it.”




Andrea Bruciati
Translation by Amanda Coulson