PAOLO PORELLI
<Winter 2019/2020 Artist-in-Residence>
From Stereotype to Archetype
CLOSING RECEPTION: Saturday, December 18th from 3-5 pm
April 2020 [RESCHEDULED FOR FALL 2021]
Our 2019 Winter Installation Residency recipient, Paolo Porelli, travelled all the way from Rome to spend seven weeks making in our studio in Rhode Island. Porelli’s culminating installation consists of sixty-eight porcelain figurines which have been cast, altered, glazed and fired many times.
Paolo Porelli, Rome Italy (1966). After graduating in painting (Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma, Italy), Porelli began a period of experimentation in ceramics in which he identified an anthropomorphic figure as his preferred expressive form. Clay remains his principal medium, although he often integrates ‘ready-mades’ in his sculptures as well as casts of found objects. Life-size to small-scale figures stand alone or in group installations.
Co-founder of CRETA Rome (2012), a centre for ceramics and fine arts which offers short-term residencies to international artists. He has participated in residencies in the US, Europe and China. His work has been presented internationally in solo, group exhibitions and ceramic biennials in Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Spain and China.
“Using an elaborate language, the result of a lifetime of immersion in art history and of experience of life, I began, like Prometheus, to form figures in clay, human archetypes animated by an endless attraction for material and the principal phenomenon that propel the global technological machine. To raise us up from this apocalyptic scene, enters humourism, the capacity to exorcise desperation, demonstrating the ridiculous element of the situation. Thus, substituting or augmenting the tragic perspective, the figures appear as if masks, relatives of the commedia dell’arte, caricatures of the primitive and eclectic aspects that despite their degraded vocation, maintain an innocence and a candor attributable to the divine images of the origin of the world. A new theogony, emblem of our time, that in virtue of their symbolic nature extends beyond space and time. ”