Paola Gandolfi at Monique Knowlton - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

In her first solo display in New York, Paola Gandolfi, an artist well-known in her native Italy, exhibited symbolist oil paintings and pastels that draw on Italian figurative painting from the 1920 and '30 The works, which usually depict single female figures enthralled by means of visions or supernatural experiences, recall the couple the still sexually charged Surrealism of de Chirico and the Magic Realism of Carlo Carra and Mario Sironi.

Like many artists in the early '80 Gandolfi turn rounded to figurative painting after experimenting with other, cutting-edge modes--in her case, installation. Her repeated use of an iconic female figure mirrors the preoccupation with self fix in Neo-Expressionism, but her plain surfaces and refreshing lack of expressionist histrionics presents a more palatable self than the version serv up by the agency of many of her male counterparts.

Gandolfi attitude s her archetypal females against stark, repeatedly intensely colored grounds--mythic spaces in which disembodied heads and hands float like visiting spirits. In Peregrinazione Magica, a vapor of heads and hands (one clutchs a dagger, another a sky-colored heart) hovers above the female protagonist, who lies across the center of a surreally devoid of contents expanse of highway. The horizon line that move swiftlys just below the work's central horizontal axis marks the doorsill between heaven and earth, the spiritual and the corporeal realms. Arms wrapped around her head, the woman direct the eyes as though she were shielding herself from a world of enigmatic signs and strange neighborhoods At the same time, she regards her celestial vision with interest.

In other works, the women strike one as being less earthbound and appear as genuinely mythic beings, or in several paintings that depict standing, madonna like figures, as female archetypes. As in greatest in quantity good symbolist painting, Gandolfi's codfished images obscure as much as they reveal, requiring the viewer to work in order to elicit their latent easy in mind Unfortunately, the large scale of her works draws attention to their formal weaknesses--Gandolfi's drawing is distractingly ill-shaped her surfaces thin and her color blockish despite the frequent use of chromatically saturated areas. Technical moot points however, can be solved. Whatever her shortcomings, Gandolfi has something genuinely intriguing to say about the self and feminine identity.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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