Coralla Maiuri presents the installation Il fucile è nell’aria: a closed space (completely painted yellow and filled with floating pollen) hosts three enigmatic polystyrene sculptures arranged high on the wall. Like unlikely hunting trophies, they evoke non-existent animals (moose? hippos?)… sort of ironic archetypes of the animal world. A long white bench placed at the foot of the sculptures helps to recreate a “hunting lodge” dimension. Furthermore, a series of remote sounds in the background convey the idea of immersion in an unreal forest: whistles, hisses, animal sounds…
Coralla Maiuri intends to recreate a “subtle memory” of possible universes, without falling into nostalgia, into the recrimination of better worlds. The embryonic forms that characterize her language come to life and become bodies close to the dimension of comics, ironic if not explicitly witty. Her sculptures take on a certain funny awkwardness in the awareness that “there is no peace under the sun” (a definition dear to the artist), so even mockery is inevitably part of being in the world. The very choice of the title Il fucile è nell’aria seems to want to remind us that in apparent harmony there is always the possibility of catastrophe, of radical and sudden transformation. All that remains is to face events with disenchanted lightness.
Italo Calvino comes to mind who, when asked to indicate “three keys, three talismans for the year 2000”, said: “learn poems by heart (…) poems keep you company, one repeats them mentally (…). Knowing that everything we have can be taken away from us at any moment. With this I’m not saying to give up anything; indeed, let’s enjoy it more than ever, but knowing that at any moment everything we have can disappear in a cloud of smoke”.
Coralla Maiuri’s drawings, sculptures and installations, like Calvino’s poems learned by heart, “keep us company” by combining lyricism and detachment, softness and roughness, gentleness and disenchantment in a circular dimension of time that welcomes us into a world intact, where however fear looms, it is lurking. Coralla Maiuri’s research is, ultimately, the search for an atavistic balance, always on the verge of breaking.
Nicola Troilo presents the painting aprile-maggio 2005 (title which recalls the time of execution of the work), a large tempera and aniline on canvas (300 x 410 cm). The recurring element of the painting (as of many others in the artist’s recent production) is a stylized human figure, declined in infinite possibilities and constructed in the contrast between the colors blue-ink and light blue-purple. It is a fluid figure that is not uniquely determined, a dynamic form, an expression of energy. It evokes currents of water or wind, floral shapes, magnetic forces. The perception of the human silhouette depends on the different dimensions in which it is traced, on the position it assumes, on the observer’s point of view: in detail, in fact, a different vision is given compared to the overall view.
Each painting by Nicola Troilo is a partial vision of an infinite space, a space of absolute freedom where self-sufficient microcosms can be recreated. You are attracted by a magnetic space in which you can immerse your gaze, melted and confused in the flow of silhouettes. They get lost in a suspended time, forgetting the linear time of the creation of the canvas (aprile-maggio 2005), to offer infinite paths in time and space. Reading a painting by Nicola Troilo is a cathartic event, a tribute to a pantheistic dimension, in which the artist gives us the illusion of touching the authentic flow of nature.
The experience of viewing Nicola Troilo’s paintings evokes Gustave Flaubert’s final words in La tentazione di Sant’Antonio: “I want to fly, to swim, to bark, to bellow, to scream. I would like to have wings, armor, skin; I would like to emit smoke, have a trunk, contort myself, divide myself in every place, be in everything, dissolve in odors, develop like plants, flow like water, vibrate like sound, shine like light, adapt to every shape, penetrate every atom, descend to the bottom of matter – be matter!”.
(Bettina della Casa – Cantonale d’Arte Museum, Lugano)
