Italy is slowly coming back to normal and interesting cultural projects are already taking over the Italian cities. In Florence, Zerial Art Project is presenting a unique pop-up solo show with works by Paolo Cervi, curated by Elisabetta Zerial.
The show is touching upon the current situation we live in as the artist is presenting a series of paintings bring with them reflections, sights, apparitions, beats and existences. Black bodies and coloured figures become symbols of the different dimensions. Painting is seen as a pretext and as a place of insistence of existential experience, as resistance, as a limit, as a temple. Paolo Cervi Kervischer's art focuses on the turbulent times we live in. In his own words: The days have been slow, often full of nothing but waiting and uncertainty. Of loss of interaction, intimacy and contact with others. That contact that the human being, in its highest expressive form, love, needs. Love that feeds on skin, body, sharing. The spectre of the pandemic and of the contagion, in a dramatic - and democratically - more evident way, on the contrary spread diffidence and control, distancing the human being from the source.
Paolo Cervi Kervischer shares his journey of the soul made of shadows that turns into color, of joys that can be abandoned. Of impossibilities and promises that are replaced by words, of emotions that are constantly looking for harmony and balance. The exhibition is on until the 12th July.
Studio Bong via di Calimaruzza 10/r Piazza della Signoria Florence info@zerialartproject.com www.zerialartproject.com
Artist's Bio:
Paolo Cervi Kervischer was born in Trieste in 1951, where he lives and works. He studied with Nino Perizi at the Scuola Libera di Figura at the Civico Museo Revoltella. He graduated in painting with Emilio Vedova at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice in 1981. Paolo Cervi Kervischer confronts us with a dimension of change that is out of scale, unmanageable and incompatible with our dream of dominating change. In his works he recounts this leap, combining poetic fragments with portraits of intimacy. He seems to want to reveal the aspects that remain hidden beneath the surface, investigating under the skin of the painting. His work is always the beginning of a story that takes him to the threshold of an unknown and fantastic world from which he brings back an unknown part. Composed materials through shapes, evocations, sensations and poetry, with which he plays and which penetrates to tell about the micro-stories hidden in the places of a visual narrative made of unease and beauty, evolution and analysis, in the ability to activate that symbolic tension capable of not dispersing emotion. The search for the identification of the human in another being is the consequence of the destruction of the stereotypes of perfection that were already destabilized: anguish, fear, beauty, poetry, are for Paolo Cervi Kervischer an attempt to deconstruct perfection of the images that the mass society reproduces. From the symbolic expressionism the tendency to build fluid and decadent atmospheres remains evident, to investigate the boundaries between the outside and the inside of a body, the passage to the most violated intimacy. He made the Toon Gee cup (1992) and the special series of cups Basket Playground (1996) for the Illy Collection. The first volume of the artist’s catalogue raisonné is currently being published: “Paolo Cervi Kervischer – 1978/2002 Catalogue Raisonné“.
His works are present in private and public collections, including Illy Collection, Generali Bank, Archivio Museo Correr and José Pinto Masal Collection.
Comments