“Paintings and Drawings from the Hanno Valley,” African-American artist Paula Wilson’s first solo exhibition in Italy, sets up a lively dialogue between delicate, almost monochromatic watercolors and brightly colored paintings. The latter works are created using a collage technique, and fragile paper cutouts charged with symbolic references emerge from the surface. These works, meditations on the realm of harmony prophesied by Martin Luther King, Jr., are marked by a dreamlike space. Hanno Valley refers to a lunar crater that the artist reimagines as a future site for the resolution of all social conflicts. Pursuing art as a vehicle for revolutionary interventions, Wilson’s visual language mixes cultures, providing terrain for a conversation between multiple mythologies. In the artist’s visions, temporal and spatial markers are often contradictory, depicting apocalypses that transpire before man—as bearer of unrest—disappears from earth. Hers is a time of primordial deities, great cultural archetypes that constitute our historical origins.
Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.
