Paolo Gioli
Peep-Hole
Paolo Gioli’s extraordinary survey at Peep-Hole demonstrated that the artist has progressed far beyond photography during the span of his four-decade career, consistently producing work that expands and extends the limits of the medium by incorporating drawing, painting, and filmmaking. The exhibition, distributed over eight rooms, included works dating from 1962 to 2010, and reconstructed the artist’s major themes and recurring concerns. The first room presented work mining classical art-historical tropes, from still life to landscape, often developed in an idiosyncratic personal manner and employing various languages, techniques, and materials. One constant in Gioli’s oeuvre is the trace of the human body. A series of charcoal-on-paper drawings, “1° Gruppo delle Creature” (1st Group of Creatures), 1962–63, was notable for its power and expressive quality, and in paintings such as Grande nudo coricato sul lato destro (Large Nude Lying Down on Its Right Side), 1965, one could see the anatomical metamorphoses that were also explored in earlier drawings.
Gioli’s working methodology has long been a valuable point of reference for artists of his generation. His experimentation with self-designed tools and found objects (including snaps, shells, and biscuits, which he uses to direct light as one would use a pinhole camera) has helped to safeguard his work against an overreliance on technical means. He has made unusual use of Polaroids, transferred onto a wide variety of supports such as acetate sheets, canvases, and silk screens, and he has investigated alternative development processes and photofinishing techniques. Gioli’s experience in New York, where he lived for about a year, from 1967 to 1968, sparked a fundamental transition in his studio practice; since then his work has been marked by a continuous intersection of painting, cinema, and photography.
The second section of the show included Immagini disturbate da un intenso parassita (Images Disturbed by an Intense Parasite), 1970, a composition that became distorted over the course of its transfer from 16-mm film to digital media. In the third room, Trittico blu (Blue Triptych), 1966, a set of paintings of monumental dimensions, executed in oil on canvas, were varied in their juxtapositions of vast geometric backgrounds characterized by the flat applications of vivid colors. These works include a multiplicity of historical references, but it is of little importance whether the work in question is a landscape or a depiction of boats traversing the Giudecca Canal (in the case of Trittico blu), or an appropriation of a scene that Buonamico Buffalmacco painted in the fourteenth century (Scomponible [Decomposable], 1966, which hung nearby); what is vital is the artist’s process of construction.
The fourth room contained yet more examples of photographic experimentation. Gioli devised a jerry-rigged apparatus to get the effect he was after: a gutted camera, whose lack of internal mechanisms allowed him to manually control the passage of film while shooting. In this way the artist is able to manipulate film and subject in real time. The exhibition included two photographic series conceived using this technique: “Figure dissolute” (Dissolute Figures), 1974–78, and “Volti attraverso” (Faces Through), 1987–2002. In the fifth room, the “Anatomie” (Self Anatomies) series,1987, demonstrated Gioli’s silkscreen-transfer technique, which allows him to leave the impression of light on photosensitive film, reviving a fresco technique known as a strappo, whereby layers are detached. In this same room, in the “Naturae” (Natures), 2009, series, the artist arrives at the final image through a stratification of different languages, treating the Polaroid film as a painterly surface.
The high point of the exhibition was found in the final room, with the Polaroid series “Eakins/Marey. L’uomo scomposto” (Eakins/Marey. Man Disassembled), 1982. Here, Gioli sought to merge portraiture (as represented by Thomas Eakins) with the action-based photographic studies of Étienne-Jules Marey, establishing a relationship between two great innovators of the nineteenth century. Eakins, an American realist painter, was also a pioneer in the field of photography; Marey’s scientific experimentation in the fields of photography and cinematography would serve to influence generations of artists to come.
Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.