Paolo Gioli: Volti

About

Microscope Gallery is very pleased to welcome Italian artist Paolo Gioli to the gallery for Volti (Faces), his first solo exhibition in the US. Paolo Gioli, who is among the artists representing Italy at this year’s Venice Biennial, began his practice with painting and has been working with 16mm film and photography since 1969, altering and reinventing historical photographic tools and techniques to achieve unprecedented uses of light and chemicals.
 
“I am not against technology, on the contrary I enjoy it deeply, I observe it, nonetheless in my work the more present is the technique, the more it is dismantled.” – PG

Volti includes selections from three photographic series and two moving images works in which the face as the manifestation of the individual – a recurrent subject of Gioli’s work as well as in the Italian Renaissance imagery to which the artist was frequently exposed during his early studies – is used to investigate identity, anonymity, the corporeal properties of the image, and the memory retained within over time.

In the black & white photographic series Volti Attraverso (Faces Through, 1987-2002), the artist revisits the photo-finish technique, involving the movements of the strip camera, the film roll within, and the subject at the moment the film is exposed. By slipping film fragments of other images into the camera’s aperture, Gioli addresses the changing nature of the self merging the human with natural elements such as spider webs, beehives, letters and text, and even a branch from a work by Talbot and the eyes of Pier Paolo Pasolini.