Forget Me Not: Paolo Bufalini & Allistair Walter

About

Fabbri Schenker Projects is pleased to present Forget Me Not, an exhibition of works by Paolo Bufalini and Allistair Walter. Like a wish or a prayer, the title suggests the preservation of a shared time. In personal memory, facts and circumstances are subject to change over time and end up taking the form of an emotional feeling attached to them. In Walter’s painting we can see how figures fade and lose their definition. The details are softened, lost, or diluted into a fluid form that seems temporary, in between a flashback or an hallucination. Feelings tend to influence the circumstances of the events from a perspective which tends to abstraction, to the immaterial form of feelings. Differently, in Bufalini’s work we find images which are precisely defined. Different tensions are crystallized in objects with strong evocative power. Despite this clear definition, the two artists share the same tendency towards abstraction. Bufalini’s work sublimate in open metaphors: two pillows that breath in synchrony, a horse saddle carrying a crystal ball. In both works time assumes a central role. In the repetition of the pillows’ movements, always the same, and in facing the future and the unknown, time is evoked as an infinite space, where memories and premonitions float, sometimes confusing with each other. In both Walter and Bufalini’s perspectives there is no grip nor handhold. Memories are deformed, feelings and affects are unstable, the re-elaboration of the past is unreliable: it is among these tensions that we can find ‘forget me not’. Not being forgotten, because in the others we find the confirmation of our existence.

Allistair Walter’s painting emerge from an interest in capturing the memory of a spontaneous moment, while at the same time deliberately trying to distort it. The subjects of his paintings are close friends and colleagues, within private and intimate spaces. Walter imagery appear slightly out-of-focus, like abstractions from reality. The artist explores images with fresh perspectives, painting things that seems to have glimpsed at the periphery of vision, such as the shadow cast on the grass in Siesta, or the soft white void in Get A Grip. The figures retain a sense of vulnerability and tenderness and the moments depicted seem to be dissolving to become only a memory of significance. The fluid brushworks give these images a sense of impermanence.

Paolo Bufalini’s sculptures are made out of objects which are often evocative of multiple references but do not exhaust in a verbal explanation. In Untitled, 2021 a crystal ball is placed on top of a horse saddle. Both objects have been used by humans as tools of control against the unknown and unpredictable forces of nature. Bufalini reflects on the ambivalent symbol of the horse, at times linked to a benign figure, a timeless companion of human beings, and other times connected to a demonic, obscure force. In the English language, the word “mare” is contained within “nightmare”. Meaning fluctuates through an association of images, memories, and words which are condensed without being explainable through verbal communication. In Proposal, 2020 two white pillows placed next to each other, simulate a synchronised breathing. The breathing pace is slow, which recalls the idea of sleep. What on a first look seems like a romantic image, on a second instance it turns ambiguous, as the perfect synchrony is achieved through an artificial device. The beat repeated in loop, renders the time continuously the same. The rhythm of the machine intrusively insinuates in the realm of sleep, affecting the rhythms of human life, the breath, the heartbeat and relationships.