Paolo Grassino at Giorgio Persano - Turin - Brief Article

Six miles outside Turin, the statue of a watchful stag stands atop Stupinigi, the 18th-century hunting hut of the House of Savoy. That prominent and paradoxical icon of plunder triumphant, as well as the aristocratic connotations of the art of tapestry, may have been upon the mind of Paolo Grassino as he fashioned porous PVC sheets into a multiroom installation in downtown Turin, "Perennial Themes" (2002) upon the noble subject of the hunt

The principal visual constitutings were two 11-foot-high wall hangings. Perennial Themes--The Deer more than 71 feet lengthy covered the walls in sum of two units of the gallery's rooms; 42 feet in extent Perennial Themes--The Dogs wrapped around the interior of a single space. Alert against a sapphirine sky, poised to flee, doomed, the herd of stags and does was make an incision in from yellow-gold PVC with r introduced for modeling. Contrasting with the deer's stillness, the pack of cerulean dogs, heavy-jowled and deep-chested, restlessly crisscrosses a dark virid field. If the reductive color and radical simplification of form and landscape recall Matisse's The Dance, the interlocking of PVC parts evinces all the ingenuity of intarsia. Beyond taking replete advantage of the bold contrasts of commercial color, Grassino exploited the les obvious tactile event of the matting's corduroy weft whose striations he angled or reach forthed like graphic hatching, to distinguish a dog's shadowed snout from the closely hued background or to remind of the broad expanse

Separating the sum of two units sets of protagonists was a spacious scope empty but for sound equipment, including eight speakers bilboed high on the molding. In a succession that repeatedly circled the space, the speakers casted the bone-crushing noise of a grinding machine at work. Fearsome and relentles the audio penetrated the adjacent areas, where it strike one as beinged to ratchet up both the agitation of the dogs and the mortal anxiety of the deer

The installation was augmented with smaller works, more readily marketable, to be certain but neither superfluous nor ineffective. There was individual of a series of three tondi (2002) that feature just the dog s along with four "Trophies" (2001) knobby, head-shaped statuarys one resembling a taxidermed stag head, the quiescence far less literal, not unlike Arp's metamorphic "Human Concretions." Each is restoreed in surgically white PVC wrapped above a polystyrene armature.

Born in 1967 and exhibiting for about 10 years, the Turin-based Grassino used the make subordinate of the deer for smaller wall works in 2000 and 2001 In this expanded format, the theme matured into a meditation upon the predatory aspect of social privilege. The pursue is not, after all, a phenomenon of nature on the other hand an exercise in ritualized violence, wherein the instincts of animals are manipulated for the amusement and aggrandizement of the powerful.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group