Marco Paganini: Inside

Marco Paganini work appears like a box, a closed box. Each box has a different size, different measures, different structure, a different way to open up, a different arrangement in the space. Inside is the name of this work, because it is on the inside of these boxes that something happens. Is indeed “inside” of each box that a world exists, becomes possible and replicable. Marco Paganini begins his research from a matrix, a generating, emblematic image, meaningful, poetic, mythological. He  builds up and gives back a foldable and portable world, the illusory possibility to endlessly duplicate the same drawing, the same creative process offered without any mediation. Graphite, pigment, contact paper, cotton, fabric and a punch are the tools he used (and actually placed inside the box) to realise a matrix with the same ancient technique used for frescoes, called “spolvero”. This is a fragile technique if reproduced and used on a pale wooden board. A risky technique that makes the drawing easily erasable by the touch (even accidental) of fingers, of a hand. The drawing is like a shadow, it is immediately perceived his evanescent and delicate nature. The images’ matrix, as all the connections in Paganini’s works, are the result of an accurate and meticulous research. But this quest is not revealed, is not depicted. You do not need to know the why or the exact process. Everybody is let with the freedom to establish connections, relations, interpretations. We find a tree, a coral, a crow, two fish, a real voice (the voice of a child) counting from one to one hundred and endlessly repeated. The drawn element is then put in a relation not only to the tools used to recreate it exactly, but also to the “real” elements that magnify his poetic sense. A white egg, a living tree, a goldfish in a fishbowl, a white pillow, are the elements that physically become part of a world of relations and possibilities. Inside is a silent and maybe incomprehensible world. When the box is opened and arranged in front of us, it is like  having the feeling of looking inside of a magic box: a magic, the silent fish swims, the tree grows, the child begins to count…and you have the feeling that there and only there it is possible what is happening. Even if we do have the tools to reproduce it, this will never happen if not in the place where it is happening. But this is not an easy task, nor by all, maybe you need to accept that you are disoriented, to leave the patterns of thought that you are loyal to and walk on unfamiliar paths and the uncertain outcomes. Sometimes it is like being in front of an enigma, an endless and perpetual “game” of relations between images and objects, a game that starts and ends precisely in the space that Marco Paganini has created for them