First, we will see an astonishing contrast between these old cans, some of which bear the logos of Italian oil companies and their interiors. They are indeed cut open, offering their insides to the public eye. One might think of the biblical parable where Jesus castigates the container and prioritizes the content.
One of these cans evokes an Italian film: The Son’s Room. The setting is in red, the color of blood, the heart, of love. The son is dead, but this scarlet red is, through the tragedy of a child’s disappearance, a hope, red is life!
Each can thus has its story; they are all the emanation of this artist’s emotions, each being the evocation of a film, a new discovery. An image is fixed at the bottom of this can, a face, a look, and everything is revealed.
This exhibition about cinema or rather about Paola Risoli’s feelings. In a way, she revisits the films, giving them another dimension inside her cans. You become an actor in the film, enter it, and live it. Photographs accompany the cans, images, texts, an exhibition of cinema, dreams, and emotion. Usually, a sculpture bursts outward and radiates its lines into space. Here, it’s quite the opposite; the sculpture internalizes and becomes discreet.
One might say: it’s just an old rusty can and the not-so-curious onlooker won’t bend down to look inside. They will have missed everything. Paola ultimately is to be earned. One must agree to bend down, to forget their false certainties. Then you are like a walker discovering a beautiful landscape, wanting to share and yet keep this discovery to yourself. The cans, the ignored and abandoned cut, is in fact the Grail. The habit does not make the monk, and Paola demonstrates this to us.
These old cans: of gasoline, oil, or petroleum, symbols of the materialistic society, rusty drums rejected and ignored, are, thanks to Paola, rehabilitated and become the setting for an artist’s emotions and film memories. A cinema exhibition, we had the Bronx drums where they also gave a soul to these drums, now we have the cinema cans, shh listen to the film reel turning, your heart beating.
The Son’s Room is the soul of this exhibition that can be seen until January 18, 2015. Thank you, Paola, for offering us this wonderful gift.
Thierry Jan
