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The medium of cinema embodies the paradox of blindness and vision, light and dark, closure and exposure. Paolo Gioli explored these qualities in his experimental filmkaking for nearly 50 years. His structuralist approach was aesthetically linked to the early influences in his career following a visit to New York in the late 1960s where he came across the works of Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner, and Ken Jacobs. The works presented in this online exhibition consider the mechanics of film production through poetic film homages to three 20th Century cultural figures, MC Escher, Marcel Duchamp and Mark Rothko.
This online presentation accompanies an exhibtion at the gallery
Paolo Gioli
Finestra Davanti a un Albero
23 February - 5 April 2024
With special thanks to Paolo Gioli's friend and producer Paolo Vampa.
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Metamorfoso (Metamorphic), 1991
Film 16 mm, black and white, silent, 18 minitues 12 seconds
In reference to the work of graphic artist MC Escher, Gioli oberved the way that his networked and mathematically inspired images appear to be metamorphasising; one form dissolving into another. This film is an homage both to the Dutch artist who was profoundly overlooked during his lifetime and to one of the major animating forces of cinema: the cross-dissolve.
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Immagini travolte dalla ruota di Duchamp (Images Overwhelmed by Duchamp's Wheel), 1994
Film 16 mm, black and white, silent 18 minutes, 10 seconds
Gioli shot this film through a spinning bicycle wheel, in tribute to the first readymade, inserting wedges of black paper between alternating spokes to create a “shutter” that rotates at varying speeds in front of the camera. In doing so he foregrounds the function of the camera shutter whilst also creating a flicker and series of 'blinking' images. This work exemplifies Gioli's technical experimentation with camera forms and the mechanics of filmaking. His motivation to deconstruct and reconstruct the machinery of cinema, was an attempt to call into questions the technological standards imposed on filmmakers and what he saw as the commercialisation of the medium.
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Rothkofilm, 2008
Film 16 mm, colour, silent, 7 minutes 15 seconds
'This is not a short documentary on Rothko, but rather my reflection on his canvasses, that become so deeply assimilated with the screen, frames of film, the frame line.'A film excavated from two books. A silent film that should be a sound film. The rhythms, the inter-pulsations of the frames of film make me think of a sound I do not know.' Paolo Gioli, 2008
Paolo Gioli : The Art of Blinking
Past viewing_room