Paolo Notaristefano | solo exhibition |
Curated by La Bottega Noord | Het Salon | ZNS project
Written by Margherita Capodiferro
20.09.2024 – 13.10.2024
Het Salon NDSM, MS Tarnweg 14, Amsterdam
SOULO is the solo exhibition of the artist Paolo Notaristefano, aka Notari. Born in Italy, in the Taranto hinterland, he lives and works in Amsterdam and here, on September 20, he presents his artistic research, in which visual arts and music, signs and sounds meet in visual and sound interweaving and conditionings.
From September 20 to October 13, at the Het Salon in Amsterdam, it will be possible to enter the imaginative world of Notari through a selection of medium and large-sized paintings, on paper and canvas. The exhibition, on the opening night, is accompanied and completed by a Live performance, a unique space-time in which the performer is simultaneously a musician and a visual artist.
Always fascinated by light, reflected and projected shadows offer him the potential for movement capable of infinite emotional implications. Contact with the Amsterdam art scene gave him the opportunity to discover new ways of exploring light and sounds. He thus experimented with a duality in which the movement of signs and the vibrations of sound intersect and complete each other. For Notari, being able to magnetize the vibrations of sound and the movement of signs in the creative process becomes as important as the finished work, its representation and its presentation.
The title of the exhibition, SOULO, confirms the duality of Notari’s creative process which, through a phonetic game and referring to his passion for music, externalizes the search for an intimate and unknown essence. Something that we call soul and that in today’s contemporaneity seems to no longer have a role. Notari does so without forgetting the phonetic sounds of his origins, with a playful but conscious approach, ironic but concrete, provocative but without resignation, arising from a manifest and profound identity analysis.
In the series of medium-sized paintings on paper (76x57cm), between sidereal landscapes, which investigate and return emotional universes balanced between the abstract and the figurative, the real and the unreal; and the synthesized and recorded sounds, almost to amplify the investigation of the most intimate and unconscious dimension that characterizes the human race, the predominance of light and its absence in an otherness that dialogues with the emotional essence is evident. The alternation of light and dark defines anonymous vibrant silhouettes, which in their apparent solidity project more or less intense shadows, more or less long depending on the degree of drama proposed and the rhythmic conditioning associated with it. It is an inner journey into foreign lands, through noisy soundscapes in which the structure of the composition comes from the sounds of the pictorial process and in which even day and night, the sinuosity and staticity of the bodies, create and propose a further visual rhythm, a movement that resonates in the individual unconscious dimension becoming observable, recognizable and therefore universal.
The duality of light/shadow, abstract/figurative, sinuous/rigid, rhythm/pause is proposed again in the large canvases (258×146 cm and 110×180 cm), in which a boundless, indefinite landscape, captured in its apparently crowded noisiness, acts as a counterpoint to the recognizable luminosity of the central nave of a church, almost a pause, both sonic and visual, before crossing the bridge, an element that, in addition to being characteristic of the city of Amsterdam, built on a network of artificial canals, contains within itself a symbolism that alludes to the journey and the connection between two dimensions. The Bridge could also be a tribute to the Japanese engraver Hiroshige, so dear to Van Gogh.
The Live performance presents the creative mode that Notari calls “TufTupa”. As an onomatopoeic expression, “TufTupa” could indicate the gesture of the hand that rhythmically resonates on the paper. Notari’s passion for music and painting is internalized in this authentic and completely personal mode. It is a synaesthetic experimentation of rhythmic signs and visual sounds, in which the musical experience plays a fundamental role, allowing him to translate surreal landscapes into indefinite spaces through improvisation in which rhythm and pictorial sign constantly dialogue, restoring a point of contact between the subjective and objective vision. In this mode of emotional involvement, the individual in his entirety is free to place himself in the environment and establish relationships, to attribute his own meaning and value to the work and to the worlds represented in it.
In this sense, the works, like the pentagram of a score, act as a trait d’union between the inside and the outside, between the known and the unknown, the conscious and the unconscious, light and darkness, sight and hearing, transforming the individual dimension into a collective experience.
ZNSproject
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