"The Weather was mild on the day of my departure": in Milan, Paolo Parisi's new solo exhibition.

The BUILDING gallery in Milan presents until March 6 Paolo Parisi ’s solo exhibition entitled The Weather was Mild on the Day of my Departure, curated by Lorenzo Bruni, conceived specifically for the exhibition rooms on the ground and second floors of the gallery.

The project The Weather was Mild on the Day of my Departure consists of four new cycles of works that reflect on the practice of painting and represent the last three years of the artist’s intense research. The works from 2018-2020 are joined by four sculptures and a video from 2013 that share the same expanded reflection on the painting object and its relationship to the container in which it fits. All the works have in common the exploration of the theme of the legacy of Modernism and monochrome painting, but also and especially of travel - physical and mental - understood as discovery and sharing the world with the “other than oneself.”

The exhibition has been conceived as a unique narrative that unfolds within BUILDING by calling the viewer into question by means of different works, cycles and techniques. The goal is an analysis of the importance of the direct experience of vision, which, as the works suggest, turns out to be complete only when a balance is achieved between concepts such as: observing and perceiving, experiencing and interpreting, figurative and abstract image, masculine and feminine, knowing how to remember but also how to forget. An attempt that coincides with the idea of identifying a third way that escapes the Western dualism of the past century.

The new cycles of works range from the monochrome paintings The Whole World in a Detail (Fabric) (2020) - iridescent surfaces due to the particular layering of color that recall the illusory preciousness of fabrics typical of Renaissance painting - to site-specific works entitled Alle ragazze d’Italia! (2021), images of landscapes from the artist’s personal archive printed on transparent fabric embroidered with modernist geometric elements taken from a sewing manual. The other two cycles are The Whole World in a Detail (2018-2019)-paintings based on the repetition of the square shape of the photographic pixel, which, however, denies itself through the layering of colors-and The Weather was Mild on the Day of my Departure (2018), from which the title of the entire exhibition is taken, consisting of diptychs that relate a painted monochrome, with a photographic image of the landscape of the Strait of Messina, between Sicily and the rest ofItaly.

What Paolo Parisi’s works in the exhibition at BUILDING have in common, in addition to the reflection on the tools of painting, is the desire to analyze the codes with which human beings interpret the measurement, imagination and perception of their crossing places, but also how they remember and design them. This need is behind both the installation work on fabric To the Girls of Italy! and the diptychs The Weather was Mild on the Day of my Departure, as well as the 2013 works. The latter are the sculptures in the series U.s.a.i.s.o. (One on top of the other clockwise) (2013) - volumes representing the element of “home” or “studio” consisting of layers of cardboard sheets and casts of the same, made of plaster - and the video work titled Untitled (postcards film) (2013) whose narrative is constantly changing thanks to a computerized system that randomly determines the sequence of images by layering them together, a process also highlighted by the electronic music designed for the occasion. Although these two cycles do not belong to the artist’s latest production, they have been included in the exhibition itinerary to highlight the coherence of intentions that Parisi has been addressing for some time now, always finding new solutions with which to open up fields of reflection that are distant, but also close, to each other.

“The theme that constantly returns in Parisi’s works, which punctuate the perception and re-imagination of the two floors of BUILDING’s architectural space,” explains exhibition curator Lorenzo Bruni, “is color and its reaction to the layering of time of vision. Color, in his case, becomes viscera and intellect in the same instant. In fact, the result to which it leads the viewer is to question the idea of direct experience in a time dominated by digital globalization and the global pandemic, which has forced people to live in their own private space while in total hyper-connection with everyone and everything. The need to reason about the contemporary contradiction of ’being or telling’ is resolved by already proposing a direction of solution by means of the title of the exhibition, which is borrowed from the text of Joshua Slocum, the first man to sail the globe solo in 1895. The phrase in question refers to the moment of his departure from the shores of Boston with no engine, no radio, no GPS, no electronic charts ... and even no knowledge of swimming. Everything points to a total adherence to the instant that does not lean toward the past, but toward the discovery of the possible future.”

For all information you can visit the official BUILDING website.

Pictured: Paolo Parisi, The Whole World in a Detail (2019, oil on canvas, 200 x 200 cm).

"The Weather was mild on the day of my departure": in Milan, Paolo Parisi's new solo exhibition.

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