Exhibitions / My Religion Is Kindness. Thank You, See You In The Future / Selected writings

SELECTED WRITINGS
PAOLA PIVI

I feel an affinity with Werner Herzog: I saw him on TV once saying, about his movie Fitzcarraldo, “I wanted to bring the boat on the other side of the mountain. I had to do it. I had to do it because if I did not do it I would had been a man without dreams and I didn’t want to be a man without dreams, so I had to do it.”

What I like about art, whether it is mine or someone else's, is the feeling that something has entered my experience, without exactly knowing what it is, but somehow feeling enriched by it.

The image in my head, even clear and definite, is not enough for me. I want it to become "real", even just for 10 seconds, but the idea must touch reality. There is a concept of truth that has to penetrate the piece, permeating it if only for just a moment - like life - and leave an indelible trace.

I don't know if animals have a soul, but surely I don't think they are just living objects. When I put them in these situations, I question whether they are living the experience of an artwork. I think an artwork doesn't need the viewer to know art nor to be conscious that he is looking at art. So I question whether these animals have seen an art-work or not.

The experimental element is for me an essential component of my work, it allows the unexpected to occur in the production of the work.

When I think of a work, it appears to me as a finished image, complete, making itself known in a kind of unconscious moment. The absolute immediacy of the idea excludes any constructive planning in this phase. The idea is produced in my relationship with the subconscious. There follows the next and second phase - the planning dimension. In reality this is just a necessary instrument in the realization of the idea.

I think men and art can't be separated. These are white animals, not black or colored animals. I think it says something about our world: we are represented in the animals, too.



SELECTED WRITINGS

Paola Pivi's works often generate a kind of panic of not-knowing in the viewer.
Geoff Lowe

Paola Pivi prefers traditional photography to computer-generated imaginary, and she stages each photograph like a performance, transporting the animals to remote locations and enacting her events. The resulting images are enigmatic, patently absurd and humorous. When displayed in public spaces, her images surprise and amuse viewers, lifting them briefly from their ordinary routine.
Jo-Ann Conklin

Paola Pivi, with her intellectual sensuality, creates monumental and baroque situations which set themselves between scenography, sculpture and architecture. And in front of Paola Pivi's art we regress in our unconscious.
Francesco Bonami

Paola Pivi uses replacement and surprise to realize strong images originated by putting a truck on its side or to turn an aircraft upside down. Her practice diverts and reorganizes the pre-existing relationship between the world and the objects: their new unnatural state of coexistence finds its roots in an enigmatic and magic way of thinking.
Germano Celant

Paola Pivi's desire to make the photo of Alicudi in real scale, is not the desire to make something bigger and bigger but is just the desire to make things adherent to reality. To be adherent to reality to the maximum level, the photo of Alicudi has to be the size of Alicudi.
Laura Cherubini

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 ordinary context.
Francesco Poli

The performative dimension emerges and seems to inspire all of Paola Pivi's work without excessively conditioning it - without being invasive. It is a process that lets itself be known intuitively. It suggests discretely and quietly the rhythm and weight of an image that has its own force and won autonomy. Therefore, the references aren't so much to the grand performative period of the Fluxus artists or Viennese Aktionismus, where the photographic image was a simple documentation both detached and subjugated to the unrepeatable action. Rather it is possible to retrace an affinity with the performative behavior of Jackson Pollock, or with the anthropometric methods of Yves Klein where the artistic action was not complete in itself but was directly functional to the production of the work.
Danilo Eccher