Exhibitions, Italy, Modena, Sassuolo, 09 April 2011
ALIENS
Andrea Paganini revisits the medieval tradition of bestiaries, in which human nature is inquired by one of its supposed opposites. Alien beings, and yet homologous to man in transversal ways and unmentionable manners, animals are one of the favourite themes of Art History, since the dawn of Palaeolithic. The informal technique of Paganini synthesizes the subjects in very quick strokes, inscribing them to the matter, to the telluric force of nature. Because wild animals are swift, and they live in hidden places. When they show themselves to humans, they do it only for a little while, and they quickly disappear. The impulsive execution renders the rapidity of these epiphanies.
The hedgehog -ambivalent animal, on one side a tender teddy-bear, on the other an armoured shield- becomes the emblem of passive resistance. All the mythologies involved with the dog represent it as an emissary of the netherworld, which comes along with its human companion across the afterlife realm. The hare is another chthonic animal, linked to the invisible world, to the moon, and to the constant renewal of nature. A log painted in white transforms into a dragon, sublimated representation of the greatest fear of everyone. A jellyfish, beautiful and poisonous, is depicted by squirts of sticky, light-orange colour, which compose the rose of its urticanting tentacles. A rhino in danger never runs away, despite its quickness, but it attacks frontally the enemy. In the art of the Far East, the monkey is the symbol of an ironic aloofness, of someone who contemplates the pseudo-wisdom of men. This is the tradition in which Paganini seems to fit in, through a close up on the eyes of this animal, which looks straight to the viewer.
The elephant is the emblem of regal power, stability, divine knowledge. The Indian god Ganesh, champion of the capability to conciliate tenderness with strength, and to distinguish what is real and what is not, has an elephantine head.
Strategies of defence and attack, love which lasts beyond death, courage and shrewdness, beauty, speed, fear, preying, re-birth: the animals of Paganini become like a prism, to be a mirror for men.
Luiza Samanda Turrini
Andrea Paganini revisits the medieval tradition of bestiaries, in which human nature is inquired by one of its supposed opposites. Alien beings, and yet homologous to man in transversal ways and unmentionable manners, animals are one of the favourite themes of Art History, since the dawn of Palaeolithic. The informal technique of Paganini synthesizes the subjects in very quick strokes, inscribing them to the matter, to the telluric force of nature. Because wild animals are swift, and they live in hidden places. When they show themselves to humans, they do it only for a little while, and they quickly disappear. The impulsive execution renders the rapidity of these epiphanies.
The hedgehog -ambivalent animal, on one side a tender teddy-bear, on the other an armoured shield- becomes the emblem of passive resistance. All the mythologies involved with the dog represent it as an emissary of the netherworld, which comes along with its human companion across the afterlife realm. The hare is another chthonic animal, linked to the invisible world, to the moon, and to the constant renewal of nature. A log painted in white transforms into a dragon, sublimated representation of the greatest fear of everyone. A jellyfish, beautiful and poisonous, is depicted by squirts of sticky, light-orange colour, which compose the rose of its urticanting tentacles. A rhino in danger never runs away, despite its quickness, but it attacks frontally the enemy. In the art of the Far East, the monkey is the symbol of an ironic aloofness, of someone who contemplates the pseudo-wisdom of men. This is the tradition in which Paganini seems to fit in, through a close up on the eyes of this animal, which looks straight to the viewer.
The elephant is the emblem of regal power, stability, divine knowledge. The Indian god Ganesh, champion of the capability to conciliate tenderness with strength, and to distinguish what is real and what is not, has an elephantine head.
Strategies of defence and attack, love which lasts beyond death, courage and shrewdness, beauty, speed, fear, preying, re-birth: the animals of Paganini become like a prism, to be a mirror for men.
Luiza Samanda Turrini
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