A STUDY OF INTROSPECTION
Introspection is a word I’ve often seen fall into improper, prosaic, hasty uses.
Here is its dictionary definition: the observation of one’s own conscience processes, compiled by the subject through the autonomous recording of their own experiences. Thus, we can say that any individual, more or less intentionally and widely, has used that ability that – partly – distinguishes us from the animal universe. Georg Schrimpf’s work called “Martha”, 1925, comes to my mind: a modern woman, leaning on a windowsill, is completely absorbed in reading a sheet of paper. The sheet is white. If observed long enough, her seemingly catatonic gaze seems enclosing absolute imperturbability towards the outer world, without revealing any rigidity in the perception of what is written — whose absence somehow mirrors her (our) inner conscience. My fascination with this work does not lie much in the smoothness of the forms, but in the truth experience I find in that look of acceptance. The knowledge of one’s inner self as the sole tool for self-fulfillment, for stoically embracing the human condition in all its turmoils — that is what ancient Greeks used to call Oikeiôsis. The same word was chosen by Mara Palena to call a project that unfolds over the duration of existence. The analog images shot by the artist from her childhood to today do not follow any external precept. Instead, they are subjected to continuous alteration which seems controlled by an individual state of conscience — sometimes fragile and melancholic, sometimes romantic, sometimes sharp or even violent, yet never graspable, just like memory itself. This infinite body of photographic works is the artist’s actual body, whose cells are the poetic intuitions that have beaten the passage of time. This body gives itself to the collective by welcoming the viewer in a large, shared mnemonic archive where each image triggers a sense of empathy in the life experience. Image after image, the artist rewrites that white sheet of paper that is at the same time life and death, love and repulsion, fashion and disuse, reprocessing and acceptance, singularity and multitude. Reminding us that amazement is, most of all, a relational event.
Matilde Scaramellini
2024 Book Launch, Published by Witty Books, COMMERCE, Milan, IT
2023 Book Launch, Published by Witty Books, Recontemporary, Turin, IT
2020 Solo Show, curated by Twenty14, Pananti Atelier, Milan, IT
Oikeiôsis
Mara Palena
Witty Books, 304 Pages / 17×24 cm
500 copies / Soft cover
Design by Giovanni Murolo
Text by Matilde Scaramellini
Published in November 2023
ISBN 979-12-80177-32-2
35€
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Mara Palena 