Paola Pivi
If you like, thank you. If you don’t like it, I’m sorry. Enjoy anyway, 2007
Aluminum, resin, plastic crystals
L 1427 x l 25 x h 670 cm

Exhibtion YOU GOTTA BE KIDDING ME, La Criée contemporary art centre, Rennes
© Paola Pivi
Courtesy La Criée contemporary art center
Photo: Benoît Mauras

For La Criée Contemporary Art Centre, Paola Pivi has created a striking installation consisting of a vast steel grid structure spanning floor to ceiling in La Criée's main gallery, entirely covered in multicolored glass beads that mimicked the appearance of precious stones. The grid was punctuated by abstract suspended modules that could evoke water droplets or tears.This grid is punctuated by suspended abstract modules that evoke water droplets or tears. Upon entering the exhibition space, the visitor is confronted by a monumental work that hovers between the flat surface of a painting and the volume of a sculpture.

Beyond these classifications, the piece evokes intentionally contradictory and paradoxical perceptions: the work’s simplicity and lightness contrast with the monumentality of the installation; the visual allure of the multicolored beads gives way to a sense of menace created by the grid, which forms an impassable barrier; the colorful space harbors an underlying sense of darkness and sadness; the flashy superficiality clashes with a latent feeling of suppressed violence.

As is often the case with Paola Pivi’s exhibitions, the narrative is never straightforward. The initial sense of surprise gives way to an analysis that draws the viewer into an atypical, absurd, bizarre, and extravagant universe. The artist delights in creating improbable situations for the audience to experience. Anything becomes possible.

Publication

Paola Pivi, It's a Cocktail Party
Editions Buchhandlung Walther König
Co-published by Portikus, Frankfurt ; La Criée contemporary art center, Rennes

Edited by Melanie Ohnemus, Larys Frogier

Essays: Robert Cailliau, Massimiliano Gioni, Martin Herbert, Scott Jonsson, Frogier Larys, Melanie Ohnemus

Deutsch, Englisch, French
Softcover
120 pages

ISBN 978-3-86560-827-7

EUR 49.80

Paola Pivi works at thrusting the image into the world: sixteen long metal tubes from which coloured liquids pour uninterruptedly (It’s a Cocktail Party, 2008); a huge steel structure reaching from floor to ceiling in a crystallisation of myriad, multicoloured artificial gemstones (If you like it, thank you. If you don’t like it, I am sorry. Enjoy anyway, 2007); a dummy polar bear covered with vivid feathers (What is My Name?, 2007); a helicopter resting on its propeller (A Helicopter upside down in a Public Space, 2006); two live zebras photographed in a vista of snow and ice (Untitled, zebras, 2003); and more.

Pivi's works are the outcome of weird but extremely, cogently precise orderings of things: representations often striking in terms not only of their shape, colour and lighting, but above all of their capacity to assert themselves as lightning-like intrusions into reality – with no narrative gambit, no symbolic justifications, no metaphorical or allegorical convolutions. It is as if, inevitable and unchallengeable, they are colliding with reality. They are there because they have to be there. Unshrinkingly the artist works towards material expression of an image that has taken over her mind and is driven, imperiously, to find existence in the world. In other words, the art of Paola Pivi systematically gambles on images with the power to be more real than any other reality.

Obviously the experience of the real must be understood as the testing and manifestation of an object incapable of being symbolised through language – unlike reality, which is already a form of representation of the world.

Extracts of Larys Frogier essay "Like Lightening"