Valerio Nicolai makes use of the house of portray to confront artwork historical past’s consecrated topic issues with parts of the prosaic and the on a regular basis. The standard nonetheless life, a device for each deadpan description and ambiguous symbolism, is declined into modern commonplace objects, photos and banal conditions. Drama and humor find yourself inhabiting his fictional scenes, constructing a rigidity between glorified creative matters and the lifelike, absurd means they will come into existence. Both by means of portray, drawing or sculpture, his work continues the derisive conceptual technique of Gino de Dominicis or Piero Manzoni by means of using essentially the most bizarre or grotesque motifs (like Mare di Merda / Sea of Shit, 2017) to convey a essential but in addition empathic view of the operate of artwork.

By approaching scale in playful method, the works will be skilled each as grandiose moments of contemplation or as straight punchlines. Monumental work of monumental horses, a longtime image of dying, take possession of the confined exhibition house, whereas the horses themselves try and occupy the image airplane and discover their place subsequent to washing machines depicted in various angles. Hinting at portray’s virtuous transparency strategies, a few of the inside drums are supposed to be seen from the skin, multiplying doable viewpoints and alluring the viewer to undertake an inescapably awkward place. The ridiculously smaller Mare di Merda work distinction the magnitude of the noble, traditional topic of the ocean to an ironic expression used when one finds themselves in huge hassle.

Behind these confined areas—both the boxy form of a washer, or the drawers, cupboards and chambers of the primary flooring—there’s an allegory of the tomb and the other ways through which funerary structure can set up and provides entry to the unknown. The determine of the fortress is used as a device to form the artist’s layering of ideas concepts, doubts and psychological processes concerned within the technique of portray. Caught up in afterthought, each conceptual and formal, the artist’s doubts and indecisions clarify the form the fortress takes. Linked by totally different patterns of assist reminiscent of spirals, ladders, stairs, and ramparts, Nicolai’s imagery drifts inside a contained house that’s wavering and at occasions paranoid, however the place all parts can transition from the crude to the poetic, from the mundane to the everlasting.

at Campoli Presti, Paris
till October 7, 2023