The roads we were going to meet each other were not marked on maps, they were as transitory as the foam produced by sheeps which however - no matter how wide the ocean may be – always outline the same routes. - Paolo Maurensig, from Canone inverso (1996)
Elementi alchemici is no easy journey to describe.
At first glance it would be convenient to unrevel its enigma by reporting its latest manifestation, which would be the exhibition: however it would also be definitely too reductive, a mere understatement deprived of all the factes making of it a totally unique pattern. Elementi alchemici was born long before the exhibition, its raison d'etre is rooted far beyond the display solutions and the intellectual framework it necessarily creates.
In fact, Elementi alchemici is the result of the meeting-clash of two creative souls, whose cosmic explosion generates the first cell of this narrations.
But first things first.
The beginning of this experimentation lies into the entanglement of two different patterns, two parallel but kindred routes which by simply touching each other created the electric shock required to produce the vision translated in the exhibition: le visual imprints by Maria Assunta Karini and the musical trilogy by Francesco Paolo Paladino. Risen and developped together, born from the urgency to hit the same nerves and to express the same sense of merciless awareness, Ariae, Siren and Icereport are the result of an unprecedented mixture – that I would dare to describe as “alchemic” - between music and visual arts. A shared path where music does not depend on art, nor art is a product of music: the two expressive forms appear to be as different parts of the same system, bones collaborating in order to support the same emotional frame. In Elementi alchemici is revealed the synesthesia described by Kandinsky, the flavour of a sacredness risen from the harmonic co-existence of artistic expressions belonging to different worlds: it is in the same shared vision that lies a common artistic path, where visual forms and musical notes are inseparable units of the same unique picture.
The exhibition is therefore nothing but the climax of a shared reflection, the concrete manifestation of a route translated into spatial terms into the setting of BiffiArte gallery in Piacenza.
Divided into three sections – as well as three are the moments of Paladino's musical itinerary and three are the series proposed by Karini – the display means to generate an environment deeply influenced by the features of air, water and ice. Therefore the exhibition becomes an immersive experimentation where space is transformed into a living entity: on one hand it vibrates by the touch of Paladino's music, gently caressing its corners in order to shape it according to their own incandescent purity; on the other hand it is carved by Karini's artworks, coherently located into the environment as units of a pulsing cellular tissue.
The viewer is asked to feel on his own skin the coldness of Ariae tears, to tremble by the persistent touch of Icereport and to drawn into the dark water alongside the mermaids of Siren: the body – belonging to the composition, to the artist or to the viewer – is called to become part of an un-actual pattern according to the definition proposed by Giorgio Agamben: a journey where knowledge and awareness are the result of a temporary misalignment of our being here and now.
Elementi alchemici is not to be only contemplated: it has to be experienced, to be felt with all the five sense, to be involved into the relentless flow where Karini and Paladino – whether we like it or not – force us to sink in.
A cura di Carlotta Biffi