Performance installations by the artist Alice Papi. Curated by Simone Cametti and Valeria De Siero. RUFA Space, 7 July 2022.
Critical text by Valeria De Siero.
Essere uno con tutto ciò che vive e ritornare, in una felice dimenticanza di
se stessi, al tutto della natura, questo è il punto più alto del pensiero e della
gioia, è la sacra cima del monte, è il luogo dell'eterna calma, dove il
meriggio perde la sua afa, il tuono la sua voce e il mare che freme e
spumeggia assomiglia all’onde di un campo di grano […].
Friedrich Hölderlin, Iperione, 1797
In the early 20th century the German poet and writer Rainer M. Rilke, wrote a short text on the art of Landscape. Starting from a consideration of the painting of ancient vases, he observed how landscape took second place to the body, the real protagonist, the subject to be contemplate, to “cultivate” like the earth, since “man, although in the world for centuries, was still too new to himself, too enthusiastic about himself to look beyond his body or to look away from it’. (R.M. Rilke, 1929).
Even when the artist began to approach the landscape, to paint it, he did so from an anthropomorphic point of view, not as landscape in itself but as a pretext for talk about a human feeling. A way of relating to the landscape that has affinities with that Presa di coscienza sulla natura (1976/1980) by Mario Giacomelli who, photographing the hills of the Marche and highlighting the signs of the land, perceived in those landscapes an extension of his existence, a way of photographing his inner reality.
The theme of the projection of the artist into the surrounding world, reflects the paintings of Alice Papi, from which abstract landscapes emerge, the result of a layering of sensations that take on indefinite shapes in brilliant colours.
With Limen, the artist steps out of the dimension of the canvas, creating an installation that could be conceived as being in three stages and which, however, does not require to be observed chronologically.
A branch, a house, a line, are the three elements of a projection by the artist. A material projection, considering the means used, but above all a mental one. Thus slides show photographs of a slender branch, always the same, as if it were the only still point present, in a bustle of ink marks and patches of colour that interfere, between one slides, with the space of the branch, without affecting it. That natural element, taken from the forest or the countryside, comes to symbolise a balance sought and perhaps found in that small constituent part of a plant.
The opposite could be said of the house, generally associated with hearth, shelter, security, and which is now immortalised with the signs of the earthquake of 2009, a past event but of which the present preserves the traces. The home is a construction of dwelling, and dwelling is for man the way of being in the world (Heidegger, 1951); but if that place fails in its function and precariousness looms, where can one find refuge? To return to inhabit the earth, that same earth that shakes the human passage; return to the “all of nature’ as Hyperion writes to Bellarmine, appears to be the only possibility.
And from the earth observe the sky, and that liminal zone that is the horizon, to question a future that is certainly uncertain, which could take on the shades of a sunset, as well as of a dawn.