Paola Pivi

Paola Pivi
(Milan, 1971)

With her unsettling and playful works, Paola Pivi offers the viewer a utopian vision of art, using an ancestral imagery that modifies the boundary between what is real and what is not. Animals in the middle of the sea, brightly colored bears, mattresses as large as entire rooms: all subjects that make a dreamlike dimension real and at the same time redefine the concept of “impossible” within artistic production.

As stated by the artist, her works express “The magic of life”. To do so, they use art as a conscious tool to observe life’s wonder, with the dual task of striking a wide audience, thanks to their impactful and ironic pop aesthetics, but also of being deeply complex in their history and conception.

Irony and challenge are inseparable traits of her poetics, immediately translating her intuitions with no apparent need to attribute symbolic or conceptual meanings that would weigh down the playful dimension.

Her work changes the boundary between what is real and what is not through paradoxical redefinitions of scale, volumes and colors that get the viewers to break down their own rational barriers and change their point of view.

Apparently different, her works arise from a coherent propensity to arrange the elements of reality in absurd and alienating relationships, accepting to run into difficult and sometimes controversial situations.

Always present, the performative component thus takes on playful characteristics, as if the artist were playing with the world.

At Galleria Nazionale, the work Untitled (2008) is a painting made up of thousands of artificial pearls. The three-dimensional work develops the concept of serial production given by synthetic pearls, combining it with the idea of luxury and preciousness.

The painting, aesthetically conceived as a work of minimal art, with colored squares alternating geometrically, looks like some sort of jewel enlarged to macroscopic proportions in order to hang on the wall.

Paola Ugolini