Curated by Larys Frogier, the solo exhibition of Paola Pivi SHARE, BUT IT’S NOT FAIR is a pretty strange title an exhibition that puts on show one large outdoor drawing on billboard showing an airplane flying upside-down and transporting a community of individuals busy in their day-to-day activities, four hundred red and yellow knotted pillows made of fabric used for Tibetan buddhist monks robes, twenty-four bear skins which form a loop in space, more than one million white pearls which spring forth from a painting, nine large fountains of colored cosmetic and drink liquids, innumerable threads of multicolored ribbons photographed, a multitude of miniature vases and chairs transformed into lamps, a print on canvas showing .
At first sight, the works express nothing but the power and simplicity of forms, the diversity and generosity of colors and the subtlety of the ordering of objects in space. The first perception that predominates in the exhibition SHARE, BUT IT’S NOT FAIR is thus one of visual and aesthetic jubilation. A specialist of contemporary art, accustomed to cultivating a necessary critical distance from works of art and often demanding from them a form that is, at a minimum, serious and conceptual, could very well misinterpret Paola Pivi’s œuvre in reducing it to a simple strategy of aesthetic seduction.
Yet let us say it right away: the critical dimension of Paola Pivi’s works passes through this necessary recognition of the pleasure of viewing. Aesthetic jubilation is at the heart of Paola Pivi’s process of creation and subsequent exhibition of works. Whoever seeks to deny or to minimize this experience would miss an important and decisive dimension in the critical reading of Paola Pivi’s works. In effect, for the artist, the pleasure of viewing is never a trick for it is that which allows for the visitor to engage in a profoundly subversive approach to the works.
Paola Pivi conceives visual constructions which exemplify the enunciation of the human subject from within the apparatuses of power. SHARE, BUT IT’S NOT FAIR is thus an exhibition where the jubilatory experience of vision sets in motion a vertiginous drift towards the fantastic by which are activated contradictory relations of scales and numbers, of unexpected confusions of spaces and situations. This seesaw in fact authorizes the return of the repressed, which is to say the consideration of a new, critical look at what makes up our reality, our symbolization of the living and our caring relation to freedom.
