Gea Casolaro

And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.
[…]
I am large, I contain multitudes.

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 51

We come from a long line of humanity: not only our parents and our ancestors, but a multitude of people who built society and were influenced by it, coming to shape the world that, generation after generation, has seen us grow and educated us and that continually changes through us.

The awareness of being at the same time progeny and progenitor of a multitude can, at first, make one’s head spin, but if you think about it, it places us in a much higher position than our single existence: a thought that suddenly places us on top of a mountain, in an observation point that allows us to have a much broader perspective.

Only the awareness of being part of a whole, intertwined like the threads of a tapestry, entangled like particles in the universe that, even if thousands of kilometers away, react in unison, can make us see reality in a profound way.

If we lose this vision, if we stop considering the people around us as the mirror of ourselves, and therefore of humanity, the world will remain only full of solipsistic shadows, unable to dialogue and therefore to have a mobile identity, creator of ideas and with an immensely extended gaze.

Thinking about it in the continuous flow of time fills us with meaning, fills us with life.

Gea Casolaro

Nous avons inventé autrui.
Come autrui nous a inventé.
Nous avions besoin l’un de l’autre.

Paul Éluard, Le Visage de la paix

Gea Casolaro
(Rome, 1965. She lives and works between Rome and Paris.)

Looking is the first cognitive act: before speaking, we come into contact with the world through our eyes. In this sense “sight has a hegemonic role in the collective sensory: it is the most social, most public sense [...] The gaze is objectifying and extroverted: it is as if it came out of its receptacle to venture into the public space, explore and probe the world”.

We could say that in Gea Casolaro’s work everything starts from the gaze: that projects us outside of us, rests on what surrounds us, chooses, weighs, evaluates, recognizes, encounters and sometimes excludes.

Photography and video, the use of reflective surfaces, the reference to optical instruments are so many metaphors of the eye, devices through which the artist invites us to think about our relationship with the other and with the world by putting a poetics and a politics of the gaze at the core of her analysis, and at the same time proposing to broaden the boundaries through the assumption of points of view that do not match our time and our space.

Non siamo che immagini negli occhi degli altri, created in 1994 and proposed again with the title Mancanza di riflessione in 2019, is an emblematic work under this point of view.

It is made of three mirrors from which a shape that corresponds to a human bust has been abraded.

In its first version, the work alludes to Pirandello’s reflection on identity and alienation, explored by the writer in the novel One, No One and One Hundred Thousand through the figure of Vitangelo Moscarda.

The mirror does not send back an image of oneself, the only true reflection of ourselves can be grasped in the gaze of the other, which also gives us back a deformed self and to which we do not feel we correspond.

In its second version, the work offers a new interpretation through the use of a new title that alludes to our inability to put ourselves in the other’s place, and therefore to make room for the other.

El tiempo de alzar los ojos - Retrato de un autorretrato (P.d.A.), 2015 is a work where a dizzying identification takes place between different subjects: it is a photographic portrait of Gea Casolaro made by the photographer Annakarin Quinto, inspired by the work on self-portrait of the Peruvian photographer Martin Chambi (1891–1973), considered the first indigenous photographer of Latin America, and of his portrait of an Andean woman leafing through a photo album.

A portrait of a self-portrait that gives us back a multiple, displaced and polycentric self through the artist’s body.

Cecilia Canziani