PAOLO TOPY
Exotica, opera del 2014, segna una tappa importante nel percorso di Paolo Topy. L’artista tenta per la prima volta di evacuare la rappresentazione del corpo introducendo il dubbio sulla sua realtà. La silhouette che vediamo è un motivo impresso sul tessuto, l’ombra proiettata da una figura in controluce dietro di esso o quella di colui che guarda l’opera? Lo spazio dell’opera diventa il luogo di un’esperienza. Lo spettatore dubita della sua percezione del soggetto rappresentato dalla silhouette. Lo spazio si dilata. Il limite tra interno ed esterno si confonde. Lo spazio diventa complesso. Esso include l’eventuale soggetto posto dietro la tenda e anche chi osserva diventa parte del decoro. L’immagine diventa il luogo della proiezione del corpo: quella del soggetto piazzata oltre la tenda, e quella del nostro corpo che si dissolve e diventa percepibile solo attraverso la proiezione. Non sappiamo più dove comincia l’ombra e dove il tessuto stampato. Le ombre e i motivi del fogliame vanno intrecciandosi. Non sappiamo più distinguerli. In questa confusione, questa instabilità organizzata del nostro pensiero e delle nostre percezioni, diventiamo l’altro. Il crollo delle nostre certezze consente l’espressione inattesa della nostra umanità.
Exotica, 2014, constitutes a major tuning point in Paolo Topy’s approach. For the first time, he toys with evacuating the representation of the body by introducing a certain doubt about its reality. Is that silhouette a pattern printed on the fabric, a shadow projected by a backlit subject placed behind it, or the shadow of the person beholding the work? The space created by those questions becomes a place of experimentation. Doubt is cast on our own perception of the subject represented by the silhouette. The space is increased. The boundary between internal and external becomes blurred. The space becomes complex. It might include the subject placed behind the curtain, or the viewer, who melts into the decor. The image becomes the site of a projection of the body: projection of the subject’s, who is placed beyond it; and of our own body, which is erased and becomes perceptible only by projection. We don’t know where the shadow ends or where the printed fabric begins. Shadows and leaf pattern intertwine and inter-penetrate. We no longer know who is who or where. In this confusion, this deliberately provoked instability of our thoughts and perceptions, we become the other. The collapse of our certitudes enables an unexpected expression of our humanity.
L’artista ha creato un trittico monumentale, maliziosamente intitolato Les Mégères (Le megere). Tre busti antichi sono fotografati frontalmente, in modo freddo e diretto, crudo potremmo dire, come per l’inventario di un museo. Paolo Topy opera una mise en abîme della relazione che abbiamo con il pensiero e lo sguardo altrui – in questo caso quello dell’uomo dell’Antichità, ormai scomparso – sull’anatomia umana e il suo modo di rappresentarla. Nell’Antichità, in virtù dell’idealizzazione, il corpo o parte di esso era sottomesso alle norme rigide della proporzione: la ricerca della perfezione rappresentava un criterio fondamentale. Le tre megere dell’opera non transigono alla regola, pur trattandosi di veri e propri ritratti il cui carattere è facilmente deducibile. Paolo Topy costruisce l’opera rivelandoci qualcosa di inatteso, che è l’espressione stessa della vita, dell’umano il quale, pur in un sistema di rappresentazione molto codificato, trova una via di espressione, attraversando il tempo e svelando caratteri propri della vita popolare dell’Antichità come di quella dell’Italia contemporanea.
It is a monumental triptych slyly titled Les Megères (The Shrews). Three busts from Ancient Rome have been photographed in a direct, cold, frontal – one could almost say “raw” way, as though for a museum inventory. Paolo Topy creates a mise en abyme from the relationship we maintain with how the other – in this case, an other who has disappeared, ancient Romans – thinks about and sees human anatomy and how it is represented. In Ancient Rome, out of a concern for idealization, representations of bodies were partially or entirely subjected to strict rules of proportion: a quest for perfection was the rule. Although the busts are realistic portraits, in which each woman’s unique character clearly shines through, these three “shrews” are no exception to that rule. Paolo Topy makes this his own piece by also revealing the unexpected, i.e. the liveliness, the profoundly human aspect, which, despite the highly coded system of representation, manages to express itself, to travel through time and to unveil characters that were part of everyday life in Ancient Rome, as they still are in contemporary Italy.
La Fète Est Finie
This photograph was taken in Africa – in Senegal, to be precise – on the outskirts of a perfectly ordinary provincial town. One of those towns that looks like so many others nowadays. For that matter, what it shows us is so un-picturesque, so un-anecdotal that it could have been taken on any continent, almost anywhere in the world. As he often does, Paolo Topy has chosen a frontal view that is heightened by the image’s complete saturation. The subject represented has taken over the field of vision entirely. No other point of reference. We are facing a reality that overwhelms us and that we cannot escape from. We have been caught in the trap of a landscape-format view whose huge size emphasizes its monumentality. Its enormity, we might be tempted to say. The image, which is both appealing and ordinary, shows us a heap of all sorts of litter: paper, plastic bags, bottles and a range of other kinds of refuse that is as varied as the artist’s view of this surprisingly brightly colored, shimmering trash seems infinite. This is no authorized garbage dump – nor even an unauthorized one. It’s simply an accumulation caused by the wind. It doesn’t allow us to identify a particular place. It’s just there, in front of us. It’s here, and, if truth be told, it’s now everywhere. The highly colorful mage seems oddly beautiful. An impression, a feeling that the use of the present in the very affirmative, even imperative, title that Paolo Topy has given it brutally tempers and even confounds. It sounds like an order and cuts things short, as singularly as a guillotine. A kind of unease sets in, a sadness too. The party’s over. But what party is he referring to? The one that we’ve all been enjoying for decades. A party that we’ve managed to export to every corner of the world, a party that has gone global, a care-free, totally irresponsible party whose sinister end is garbed in a thousand venomous colors here. The awakening in front of an image like this is as brutal as the one the day after a party when you overdid things. As long as it lasted, we consumed without asking questions, without worrying about our environment, without thinking about taking care of others or even ourselves. We have established that model of unbridled consumerism as a way of life, an absolute model. So appealing and even fascinating that it was all the easier to impose it around the world. Having turned into the easy vehicle for a sub-culture that swept everything away in its wake, it has left nothing behind but disaster – both ecologically speaking and in other terms as well. Traditional lifestyles that respect a balanced relationship with nature, and sometimes even millennia-old cultures, have been reduced to the state of trash and swept away by the powerful winds of overflowing, unconscious optimism. What used to be so lively because it respected life is now dead or dying. We’re reeling, yet we still hesitate to do anything about it. You have to admit; it was one hell of a party! And then, there’s the doubt that engulfs us. The awakening that worms in, despite everything, and, truth be told, a certain anxiety about having to feel guilty. Besides, isn’t it too late already? Blind euphoria keeps tempting us over and over, like a last refuge from an upsetting reality. Our gaze, the one that has landed on this image and been seduced and hypnotized by its colors, has to change. That is the effort the artist is inviting us to make. What’s beautiful here isn’t what we can see, but Paolo Topy’s ability to make us experience the ambiguity of the image to the bitter end, all the way to a consciousness raising. It is the experience of awakening, of our newly rediscovered consciousness, that truly announces the end of the party.
In 1962, Dr. Boris Mayer Levinson, a child psychiatrist, published an article in the journal “Mental Hygiene” about the beneficial effects that animals can have on people: “the dog as co-therapist”: it was revolutionary. In this tender and caustic series of portraits pairing all sorts of animals – including toy ones – with their owners, Paolo Topy is also evoking something else. Perhaps he is indicating the extremely fragile limits of this theory, or at the very least, its complexity. The situation may indeed be both less certain and more troubling. While a certain physical, and especially mental, well-being induced by the presence of our four-legged “friends” is now recognized, it would seem that their curative vocation quite simply flies out the door, at least in terms of mental hygiene. In this series, animals or their symbolic representations are obviously a place of refuge for our affections, but not without a certain form of derision. A “touch of folly” that is hardly new, since these representations were introduced to the court by Henry III. The number of aristocratic portraits involving pets produced since then has grown too high to count. In this series, the madness is acknowledged and flaunted. Tenderness, pride, humor and even self-mockery are all interwoven. Freely acknowledging one’s folly, liberating oneself from convention may well, in this specific case, be the best way to find fulfillment, to be happy and serene, or at least to seem to be so by default.