#MAPPE E TRACCE. Mappe e Tracce

In these turbulent times we are living through, we are all fragile inhabitants of a planet that screams, and we all feel the need for a compass.

We seek an effective tool to help us find the direction to aim for, not to get lost in our journey while dreaming of a destination of peace. A man of land and sea, Vincenzo Paonessa, scrutinizes the waves of the Ionian and the leaves of the underbrush with the same restless gaze he had when, as a boy, he attended Luigi Magli’s “en plein air” lessons at the Catanzaro School of Painting. The remains of branches collected on the Calabrian beach, as well as the leaves and branches of the Sila, became, over the years, the alphabet of a code gradually being built in his inner cosmos. I remember my first visit to his Mantuan studio, when I immediately noticed that curious chair assembled with some reclaimed wood and completed with a seat made by recycling a paper map. And I remember that, at that precise moment, it was as if a light had illuminated the entire studio, allowing me to see maps everywhere. Following the creation of his first artist monograph, dedicated to the first thirty years of his activity, and his solo exhibition at the Casa di Rigoletto in Mantua, this new project hosted by NUMM -Contemporary Art retains the wonder one feels before this fascinating widespread cartography, which tells of coordinates traced by navigators and worn pages of old school atlases. The invitation is to come closer to perceive that these maps are not simply such, but are actually non-maps, utopian representations made by sewing together fragments of States that are geographically distant, thus creating nowhere landsof new “E-stati”. New perspectives where there are no longer borders or violence, but where humanity can start anew. 

A peace represented with a thread, a powerful political treaty signed by Paonessa not with a pen but with a needle. An ancient gesture of sewing, learned in the family, absorbed in its ancestral rituality, and replicated with the desire to recompose fragments to create a new possible life. The same spirit is evoked in the “Ideal Cities”, traced with a thin embroidery, white on white, inspired by ancient fortified cities, designed as a protected space yearning for perfection, made eternal by the gold leaf that symbolically evokes the sacredness of such desire. In some more recent maps, the artist reveals a series of “Impediments”: in this case, painting overlaps paper maps and, in the transparency of the medium supporting the color matter, amplifies a dialogue between representation, abstraction, and reinvention. Paonessa’s conceptual experience, germinated in his Academy years and developed by looking at Joseph Cornell’s Surrealism, becomes the impetus for a skillful symbolic narrative of today’s dramas. For example, the map of Tunisia, disassembled and reassembled with the title “Punto/i di Raccolta” tells more than any rhetoric about the tragedies of desperate nomadism coming from the heart of Africa to the Mediterranean, step by step. In this map, voids and lacerating absences open up like incurable wounds. Paonessa’s guide for all of us is this strength of observing life with a gaze projected into infinity, seeking new trajectories and new paths. His impossible maps can also become this: companions of wandering souls on tortuous journeys, precious treasure maps, and places of waiting and hope for a new sky and a new earth.

Paola Artoni