Pippa Bacca, BOULES DE BROUILLARD
Room 5
In Milan there used to be a lot of fog and you could play in the fog, as the song says (but then she would shout and then the game was no good and maybe it had to be played again, maybe not, it’s not clear). Now there is almost no fog in Milan, but I, who am not so young, remember it well and I also remember many people I met who occasionally emerged from the fog of this city, carrying within themselves the sense of it. But I am not the only one who remembers, and so I also want to give a form to those very real, though perhaps invented, people that Testori tells us about in Il ponte della Ghisolfa. This is not an illustration of the book, but an interpretation of the characters given by people who could be their modern version today. Thus juxtaposed with even truer portraits taken from the novel, they are all closed in jars, for better preservation, placed under grappa and immersed in fog.
Pippa Bacca
One of the problems man has always struggled with is that of the being and appearance of a thing, real or mental, and its relationship with the word that defines it: what is true and real? That which we see or something that the eye does not perceive? Heraclitus said that a river is never the same because the flowing water makes it an ever-changing entity, yet the “name” is always the same. The extreme idealists claimed that the reality of a thing is given by the thought that thinks it, only to injure themselves by hitting, in the darkness of a room, a leg on a chair that, unthought, did not exist! Gertrude Stein, Picasso’s great friend, used to say that “a rose is a rose, a rose, a rose”. But this is not true, and Pippa shows us, highlighting what complexity lies behind simple things and how many possibilities exist for establishing stable definitions whose reduction, Occam’s famous razor, risks complicating things even more. And so, an apparently nonchalant, ironic, “light” art leads us to “high” reflections that go beyond the pleasure of the eye and reminds us that man, if he is such, was made to “follow virtue and knowledge”.
Giorgio Bonomi
Pippa Bacca (1974- 2008)
Posted on: 22 November 2021, by : Alessandro Ulleri