Respiro, all’interno dell’esterno dell’interno…
Curated by Claudia Gioia
11 Oct 2017 – 11 Nov 2017
Paolo Icaro (Turin, 1936), exponent of the artistic research of the Sixties, has immediately assumed an original position in the history of Italian and international art; close to the experience of Arte Povera has developed its own language that renews the definition of sculpture.
Living between Rome, Turin, New York and Genoa, Paolo Icaro shifts his nomadic attitude to a never ending investigation on matter and form, experimenting with the process of sculptural action in relation to space.
For Fondazione VOLUME! Paolo Icaro chooses to interact with the history and the emotional nature of the environment, with its white surface and its stratifications of sense that brings to memory the infinite possibilities of a element like chalk, used in many of his sculptures.
Paolo Icaro covers the interior spaces of Via di San Francesco di Sales with polyethylene cloths caressing the walls of VOLUME! making it sensitive and reactive to every breath and to the spectator’s passage. Transparencies and overlays animate the space that, through Paolo Icaro‘s intervention, transforms it into a living place, capable of restoring the memory kept from his walls. On this occasion Paolo Icaro reinterprets some classical elements of his poetry, continuing the journey of experimentation on materials and spatiality. The use of plastic, in fact, reminds the intervention made in Rome in 1968 for the Teatro delle mostre at the Galleria La Tartaruga of Plinio De Martiis, when he decided to rhythm the exhibition space with a coated polyethylene cloth (Buchi 1,000,000, 1968). And the artwork Tenda nera (1968) painted by Icaro up to the maximum height reached by his arms, with this gesture the artist try to transforms his body into the unite measurement of the surface.
By maintaining constant attention to perception, now Icaro proposes a work that, moving on the fragile balance between opacity and transparency, accompanies the viewer in the an experience of new emotions and old memories. Covers and at the same time dematerializes the space, eliminates every stump and makes time, sedimented on the ‘skin’ of FONDAZIONE VOLUME!, a liquid surface in continuous motion. Paolo Icaro‘s sculpture gives life to new environments and, freed from aspirations of immutability and eternity, makes visible once again the bond between art and life. Paolo Icaro (Turin, 1936. He lives and works in Tavullia, Pesaro) participates in the 1960s at the beginnings of Arte Povera and takes part in the most significant exhibitions of those years such as Arte Povera – Im Spazio, Galleria La Bertesca, Genova (1967); Teatro delle mostre, Galleria La Tartaruga, Roma (1968); Arte Povera più Azioni Povere, Amalfi (1968); Op Losse Schroeven. Situaties en cryptostructuren, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1969); When Attitudes Become Form, Kunsthalle Bern, Berna (1969). In 1971, Paolo Icaro to the United States, Connecticut, where he began an environmental and performative reflection of his sculptural practice, close to the currents of Concept Art and Process Art. Since the 1980s, after his return to Italy, he has held numerous personal exhibitions in institutions such as: PAC – Pavilion of Contemporary Art, Milan (1982); Palazzina dei Giardini, Modena (1987); Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Trento (1995). In 2011 he participates in the 54th Venice Biennale. In 2014 he realized the personal exhibition Appunti di viaggio 1967-2014 at Peep Hole Milan. In 2016 he was invited to the XVI Quadriennale d’Arte of Rome and to the exhibition L’Inarchiviabile, curated by Marco Scotini at the Frigoriferi Milanesi. Also in 2016 the monograph Faredisfarerifareevedere, curated by Lara Conte, was published and distributed by Mousse Publishing. He recently inaugurated his project Un prato in quattro tempi at the Cloister of the State University of Milan.
Fondazione VOLUME!
Via San Francesco di Sales, 86/88
Rome