After completing her studies at the Bologna Academy of Fine Arts, Eva Marisaldi (Bologna, 1966) entered the art world in the late ’80s, notably participating in two editions of the Venice Biennale (1993, 2001). Her ability to observe the world and listen to every aspect, every detail of reality, and her capacity to translate this faculty into unconventional visual compositions, difficult to catalog according to traditional standards, became immediately evident. Indeed, her works result from an operative technique expressing itself in the free representation of thoughts as they appear in the author’s mind and which, without being organized in conventional solutions, come alive with their own life until their final development. The spectator is invited to follow their rhythm and participate, assuming an active, participatory role typical of relational dynamics. Drawing on her ability to reflect on and analyze her surroundings, Eva Marisaldi is particularly interested in the private sphere of the individual and the social and environmental reality that surrounds them, giving rise to micro-narratives in which analogies and contrasts prevail over the linearity of the narrative, and logical shifts and intellectual contrasts over its logical framework. In this way, the transition from chronicle to fantasy is rapid and the landing in parallel worlds is continuous, always marked by a strong personal imprint from the artist’s contemplation of existence. In this sense, her work, while touching on universal themes, is profoundly autobiographical, stemming as it does from cognitive processes linked to her own experience and the many aspects that nourish it day after day. With surprising ease, Marisaldi synthesizes this complex reality, making simple what is by nature articulated, and summarising the results of her investigation in visual, aural, and literary elements that are as semantically dense as they are expressively modest. Even if the reflections come from historical sources and subjects with chronologically and culturally well-defined profiles, the theme examined is never interpreted by the artist in a “literal” solution, but rather by following an unpredictable and fluid path, in which only the starting hypothesis is certain.
“Collaborazioni,” which marks the artist’s ideal return to France—her work having been already exhibited in Paris (“Migrateurs,” 1993 and “L’Hiver de l’Amour,” 1994, both at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Hotel Carlton Palace: Chambre 763, Hotel Carlton, 1993) and in other French cities (Biennale de Lyon, 2002)—prove it. The exhibition brings together works created for the occasion with musician Enrico Serotti which, as usual, express themselves in an articulated variety of linguistic systems, capable of introducing the viewer to a multi-sensory experience. What these works have in common is the theme of collaboration—direct, indirect, at a distance—also considered in relation to the experience of other artists: it’s no coincidence that they were also born of numerous encounters and exchanges of ideas between Eva Marisaldi and Achraf Touloub, co-founder of Parliament.
D’aprés (Adrian Paci), 2023 acts as a testimony of this process: the miniature theatre is inspired by and in homage to Adrian Paci’s video Turn on (2004) in which nineteen men, seated on bleachers, are turning on noisy petrol-powered electric generators which, in turn, light as many construction site lamps, Each man holding his lamp. In D’aprés (Adrian Paci), the men are replaced by stones (which Marisaldi has already identified on other occasions as subjects capable of metaphorically reactivating human activities) lit by electricity produced by a mechanism that exploits gravitational force.
Another example is the two works, entitled Circolare, 2023. The first is a micro-sculpture composed of a few stones brushed by other stones suspended from a wire driven by an electrical mechanism. The continuous, circular movement generated makes the stones ‘speak’, giving rise to a sound that, amplified by microphones, determines an imaginary conversation between nature and technology. As in the previous case, the natural components used and the action to which they are subjected evoke different phases of history, from the primordial gesture of tracing circles on sand, snow, dust, etc. to the various interpretations given to it by avant-garde and neo-avant-garde artists over the twentieth century.
The second consists of a series of laser-cut plates in which, amid the paper inlays (created ‘by subtraction’, meaning by burning the paper with the laser and making holes in it), human faces and figures emerge and come to life on the sheets thanks to the technological support. These are sixteen still images taken from the video Circolare, documenting two editions of a performance carried out in Trento (2009) and Baggio (2019) on a circuit of bumper cars in the company of a group of artists/friends (including Diego Perrone, Liliana Moro, Gosia Turzeniecka, Italo Zuffi, M+M, Francesco Voltolina, Cesare Viel, Emilio Fantin, Marco Vaglieri, Maurizio Mercuri, Marco Samorè in 2009; Yumi Karasumaru, Luca Trevisani, Franco Guerzoni, Martino Genchi, Daniele Maffeis, Massimo Bartolini, Chiara Camoni, Stefania Galegati, Amedeo Martegani, Cesare Viel, Cuoghi Corsello, Paola Anizichè in 2019, the date of the video exhibited in Paris), each in their way confronting the dynamics playfully represented by the merry-go-round—meeting and clash, union and separation, dialogue and silence—in an atmosphere of joyful community and sharing.
The reference to the history of art and its cooperative capacity to create dialectical links also recurs in Senza titolo, 2023, a decal which, inspired by the urban context in which the exhibition is set, pays homage to the thought and action (the caravan that set up in Skulptur Projekte Münster in 1977) of Michael Asher.
—Pier Paolo Pancotto
at Parliament, Paris
until January 13, 2024