paper weight – work in progress

Paper weight:eight day of work for Elena Carozzi, Beatrice Meoni, Phillippa Peckham, Maja Thommen, Silvia Vendramel.
The five artists in Residency have been working for a week inside the spaces of the former paper mill (Cartiera), this extraordinary compound of industrial archaeology found in the southern part of the Belluno Province, and by the border with Treviso‘s.

Inside, everything is white and pale-grey, and there’s the air, the noise of all the waters around. Outside, a cannibal green pushes and pushes; it is a pictorial contrast, it digs perceptive trenches canals.
The shapes under contstructions, plastic, sculptural, embossed, graphic, and pictorial, chromatic and installative, FIND AND CREATE SPACE, NOW, intimately connecting with the geometry of the site and its history: opening, enlarging, projecting it, walking it down (the work in the rooms below ground), and up (the lines raise, vertical rhythms).

The main hangar of the Paper Mill is devoid of doors and windows: the landscape, the light, the wind, continuously invade this Space-of-the-flows, it feels like being on the deck of a ship, here we are in high sea, inside and outside framing and mixing themselves up every seconf, the procedural actions carried out by the artists, under the exceptional elegance of a sky armed with concrete, on vast floors and walls, create themselves samples of landscapes and decks, and the hangar becomes a great chamber of exchange, a gallery of shapes morphed in the winds and other fluids (maya’s two-stage river, with pulled nylon, which project itself like a ramp from a light hole in the dazzling green of humid nature, is a cordophone architecture, measure of emotional transfer).
Here a long line has embraced the space from the inside, running choppy in the its own material mass, from bottom to top, raising its gaze from the ground-level concrete. And the horizontal-scending line finds under itself the quiet field of silvia’s cementitius drums, which calls to mind the flowers and the acropoleis (remnants of columns, and drums, and bases) of a white world long gone, that resonates, still, to this day.
Like the waters in the hypogeous maceration baisins, where philippa wets and works on the incredible repap paper, and from here, and from the canals, and the waterfalls surrounding the Paper Mill bounce off the sounds of thunder and flows.

And meanwhile, the graphic and pictographic layers grow on the walls, with elena and beatrice, some in canonical geometrical order, in the classical texture of the contemporary fresco, others in no particular order, opening windows of communication and possible dialogue, operating on signs and designs, and on words and writings, left here by someone in recent times, eliding and integrating, reclaiming and suggesting, while all this whole space now drips with shapes and ideas, which are liquid and scattered and wide in the extended body of the paper mill, that welcomes everything inside its open breath, in this mobile belly, which isn’t silent anymore.

gianluca d’incà levis
(27/08/2015)

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