Daimon's walk by Raffaella Guidobono A green line exiting, a front door for entering and a way of leaving, an arrival and a departure, a horizon wherein one can perceive an animal, a clearing, a lake, a sky, a river, a sea, a multitude of presences, real or ephemeral, but always pregnant like a poem, peaceful like a desert, where a mirage is sure to appear. The drawing of a green line is reached through philosophical reflections. The presence of a lion-symbol, also green, and its transfiguration into a line comes out of reading Hebrew texts. Within Patricia Carmo's abstract work there is an invisible awareness of the history of the last century, a history only 60 years old yet a testament to the horrors of a time when cleanliness and order were dangerous imperatives. The initial series of preparatory drawings allows the viewer to intuit the format of the installation presented at Palazzo Chigi, where Galleria Miralli is located. Subsequently we see a base layer of white plaster, with white plaster calcifications and mixed pigments on wood, a watercolor stuck to a large square canvas that summarizes the whole show, and offers many choices of how to look at the work. It is as if the artist had left the main motif aside for a moment, in order to develop parallel meanings, to add explanations, and to narrate specific stories that clarify the details of the main theme. We abandon ourselves to the flow of thoughts in order to move away from the overall concept, and then go back to the main topic and go away again. Some pieces are particularly visual; others underscore a tension that exists beyond the traced line, beyond the significance of its own pattern and towards other meanings. And if these drawings are a selection of studies of new paths, curves, ellipses, fractions and circular developments of future installations, the idea of the large central painting in the second room is that of a mute presence, at once massive and eloquent. This piece, a harbinger of a great sense of balance and representative of the elements also appearing elsewhere in the show, seems to come out of the theoretical research of the great master Giulio Paolini, as well as the texts written about matrilineal cultures by Göttner-Abendroth, the poetry by Sappho, Mallarmé, Cecilia Meireles and Clarice Lispector. Above all, there is a strong alchemical component, comprising the development of the use of animism and the symbolism of the green lion. Somehow via distant paths, through repeated forms that are always the same, and in the importance of the surface-canvas as the only object of representation, Patricia Carmo revisits human existence through her insistent use of a color that is simultaneously mutating and stable, material that can transmit and impose its presence. The work itself becomes an object and its process is unpredictable. The conception of the work remains non-interventionist. Art can "happen" or "not happen", but in either case it does not depend on its creator. "It's our point of view, not the object (always the same or intended to become so), the trajectory of the gaze (always different and therefore unrepeatable) that draws, nobody knows where, the space of the exhibition", Paolini said of a show in 2003. For Patricia Carmo the green line seems to open and close a series of unanswered questions. Her first work with the upside-down aprons consisted of 12 "ornaments" that were each transformed into portraits of the artisans who had worn them for a few weeks. In the last year the artist has reexamined humankind's chronic incapacity to maintain relationships and our desire to find a connection, a gleam of clear, clean and pure light. Again on the topic of purity, salt becomes a metaphorical element in the study of Biblical texts and their multiple meanings. In the etymology of salt, the artist finds parallels to animals and places, salamanders, snakes, lions that in the early drawings invoked the animal body and were then purified and changed into a green line where the feline is loosely scribbled, with no intention of being a real representation. The line crosses the lion's head and runs above the mountains of salt that seem to impose cleanliness and, at the same time, become dirty as they pass over the paper and the canvas, spaces that expand, almost like a green two-dimensional ray, an apparition. Sometimes the line doubles and overlaps itself, tries to untie a knot and presents itself as a possible way to relieve traumas, dissolve tensions, pacify conflicts. Where is this green line going? the artist asks herself, aware that at the beginning, this representation was an attempt to find a cure; whereas now the work takes another direction, leading to ethereal works, where the line returns, insists, seems to continue beyond the margin of the paper, and in other moments is shaken by the wind. Suddenly, we are the vertex of this work, inside the installation. Stopped from changing the world, we are prepared to observe it. Rome, February 2008. PATRICIA CARMO BALTAZAR CORREA WORKS moleskine detour 2008 madre 2008 daimon's walk 2008 unsichtbares wesen 2007 lion line 2007 bucato 2006 corpus 2005 drawings 2002-2008 CONTACT cv and e-mail TEXTS roberto annecchini - madre - (italiano) raffaella guidobono - sentiero del daimon - (italiano) | (english) eleonora di erasmo - unsichtabers wesen - (italiano) raffaella guidobono- corpus - (italiano) | (english) pericle guaglianone -corpus (italiano) | (english) eleonora di erasmo - bucato (italiano) | (english) eleonora di erasmo - pau brasil - (italiano) fabio moreira leite - landscapes for zora - (português) uemon ikeda - (italiano) rossella caruso - corpus (italiano) andrea antoniazza - critica d'arte (italiano) artist's statement (english) credits