...Paola’s paintings remind me of Baudelaire’s poem “L’invitation au voyage”: “Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté, calme luxe et volupte”. Ottavio Fabbri
PAOLA BURATTO CAOVILLA B I O G R A P H Y
Venetian and world citizen. Paola studied at the Venice Academy of Art and Photography. She lives her life between Tuscany, Siena and Venice. After publishing her books all around the world, she is showing her paintings in Monte Carlo. A talent she must have inherited from her ancestor, the famous Venetian painter, Giovanni Battista Piazzetta. In Paola’s artwork, she attaches particular importance to gold, not the golden colour but the golden light, the one that enlightens our days and warms our hearts. She blends colours and textures together, plays with fine layers which entice us to caress gently. Paola never leaves the models she paints in their original state, she enriches them. She likes painting shoes, items she keeps close to her heart in reminiscence of the way they inspired her family’s joyful creativity. In her artwork, the shape of the shoe becomes a thin line, the stone background becomes transparent and fades, the light brush strokes create waves of Eastern tones that remind us of the fabulous mosaics of the Basilica di San Marco in Venice. This exposition is the culminating point of a long journey that started with watercolours and paint brushes. The soft brush strokes that Paola applied with rhythm carry us into a musical dream world.
PAOL A BUR AT TO CAOVILL A · PAOL A @ CAOVILL A.COM · W W W.PAOL ACAOVILL A.IT
LIFE
IS
BE AUTIFUL
C L A U D I O
Mentre stiamo per presentare a Lugano le opere eleganti e solari di Paola Buratto Caovilla, che con un’energia raffinata e positiva ricordano che la vita è bella, per contrapposizione mi torna in mente la primavera del 1989 a Pechino. In una mostra d’arte organizzata dall’Accademia gli sviluppi sociali rispecchiati nelle opere degli artisti più sensibili preannunciavano l’inimmaginabile. Lasciavo una Pechino che al rientro in estate non avrei più riconosciuto. Dieci anni dopo alla Tate Gallery di Londra, l’installazione di una giovane artista depressa, Tracey Emin, My bed in lista per il prestigioso Turner Price, costituita dal proprio letto sfatto con bottiglie vuote e biancheria divenne famosa perché due cinesi ci sarebbero saltati sopra ed avrebbero fatto a cuscinate. Nel frattempo, se ricordo bene, nella sezione “dAppertutto” della Biennale di Venezia Harald Szeemann aveva invitato oltre 200 partecipanti, dei quali soltanto dieci erano detti artisti di pennello, anzi, “pittori”, così come li chiamavano nel Ventesimo Secolo. E gli altri? Dieter Roth, aveva riempito uno scaffale in legno (Soloszenen, 19981999). Un camion da 2,5 tonnellate, carico di multicolori vestiti usati e coperte dedicato ai rifugiati del Kosovo (Kim Soo-ja, Cities on the Move - Bottari Truck in Exile, 1999) non lasciava indifferenti. Potevamo chiamarlo “bello” senza per questo offendere? Almeno la zattera con la panchina blu di Bruna Esposito che galleggiava alle Gaggiandre poteva dirsi “bella”? Si disse fosse stato scritto il De Profundis all’essenzialità della bellezza. Se ci si fosse però azzardati a dire che un funerale più “bello” non si sarebbe proprio potuto organizzare, penso si sarebbero arrabbiati tutti. Io vorrei invece augurarmi che l’arte, come linguaggio universale, unisca e non divida, esprima sì emozioni, rivolte, denunce, ma che per questo non smetta di ricercare la bellezza, senza la quale perderebbe l’uomo che è pur sempre l’origine e l’obiettivo della ricerca. Con questo spirito ho visitato l’atelier di Paola Buratto Caovilla a Stra, molto vicina a Venezia e al suo spirito eterno, che tutto ha visto passare restando comunque se stessa. Assuefatto dall’arte ad effetto, stufo dei tentativi di stupire senza copiare seppur copiando, della fallimentare ricerca di nuovi contenitori da riempire a seconda delle richieste, dell’artigianato scenografico on demand, cercavo eleganza, armonia ed il piacere del bello ed ho trovato anche grande serietà, amore per il lavoro, tradizione e soprattutto un messaggio positivo. Venezia e Stra sono vicine e lo si percepisce anche in tutte le opere di Paola marcate dalla prestigiosa tradizione artistica di famiglia, presente nel gusto raffinato e nel rispetto religioso per la qualità del lavoro, che infine è rispetto per l’osservatore al quale Paola si riferisce: Life is Beautiful, la vita è bella! Non è uno slogan, è però un grido controcorrente, energico, vibrante, fatto di un’esplosione di colori che ha la stessa forza di un murales di denuncia, un invito fortissimo: Life is Beautiful, la vita è bella! Fa’ che lo sia! Apprezzala, fallo con il tuo lavoro, con il tuo modo di essere! Paola lo fa con la gran cura, dedizione e maestria, gusto ed eleganza che riserva alle proprie opere, che dedica all’osservatore.
M E T Z G E R
The elegant and radiant works of Paola Buratto Caovilla, that are about to be up in Lugano, entail a positive and refined energy that reminds us that life is beautiful and at the same time makes me think back of my spring time in Peking in 1989. At that time, the works of the most far-sighted artists exhibited by the Academy, reflected an extent of social changes that already forecast what no one could ever have imagined. The Peking I left was no longer the same that I found when I returned later that summer. Ten years later, at the Tate Gallery in London, Tracey Emin - a young and depressed artist - installed a show entitled My Bed that received a nomination for the Turner Price. The show focused on her bed, completely undone with empty bottles and linens all over. She rose to celebrity because two Chinese people allegedly stepped on it and started a pillow fight. In the meantime, if I remember well, Harald Szeemann had invited some 200 participants to the “dAppertutto” section of the Venice Biennial and only ten of them were paint-brush artists or painters, as they were called in the twentieth century. And what about the rest? Dieter Roth, filled up a wooden shelf (Soloszenen, 1998-1999). A quite striking 2.5 ton truck full of used, all-colour garments and blankets dedicated to the refugees in Kosovo (Kim Soo-ja, Cities on the Move - Bottari Truck in Exile, 1999). Was it possible at all to say that it was “beautiful” without making fun of it? The concept of “beauty” had acquired a negative value and I was wondering if at least Bruna Esposito’s raft with a blue bench floating at the Gaggiandre could be considered “beautiful”. Someone said that it was the burial of the essence of beauty. However, if one dared saying that no “nicer” funeral could ever have been arranged, maybe this statement would have made everybody else quiet upset. But I hope that art, as a form of universal language, will unite instead of separate, and will express emotions, uprisings, and claims but will keep on striving and longing for beauty. Because without beauty, art would lose human beings that are and always were its source and objective. This is how I felt when I was visiting Paola Buratto Caovilla’s studio in Stra, near Venice, a city with an eternal mood that experienced all and many changes but never lost its identity. Accustomed to sensational art, exhausted by the attempts to amaze without copying, and yet copying all the same; distressed by the fruitless research of new vessels to be filled up according to some new trend and tired of on-demand scenery crafts, I was looking for elegance, harmony and the pleasure of beauty. Among all this, I also found great rigour, passion for one’s own job, tradition and most of all a positive message. Venice and Stra are pretty close to each other, and you can tell that by Paola’s works, which are all characterized by the very prestigious art-tradition of her family, and reveal an exclusive trait and an extremely deferential approach to the quality of the work, which translates into a respectful attitude towards the observer who is Paola’s interlocutor. Life is Beautiful, la vita è bella! This is much more than a motto. It’s a powerful, vibrant voice rising against the current trends in an outburst of colours similarly to an art graffiti, a shouting statement, a very strong invitation: Life is Beautiful, la vita è bella! Let it be so! Love your life, love what you do, and the way you are! Paola loves life and she does so with the same care, dedication, virtuosity and elegance she reserves to her works which are all dedicated to her public.
AION MASTERPIECES S.A. - CLAUDIO METZGER MEMBER OF THE BOARD
AION Masterpieces è una società specializzata in Fine Art Management che fonda il proprio modello di business sull’interazione sinergica fra tre aree di competenza: arte, diritto ed economia. All’interno di un settore così specifico come quello dell’arte e in un mondo globalizzato in continua evoluzione, si rivelano sempre più necessarie specifiche competenze tecniche ed un servizio di qualità ineccepibile. AION Masterpieces si relaziona al cliente come unica interfaccia e ciò grazie all‘interazione fra più professionisti all’interno della società: Claudio Metzger, storico ed esperto d’arte, Maria Elisa Giorgi, storica dell’arte, Fabrizio P. Mion, avvocato attivo principalmente nel campo del diritto civile, segnatamente nel diritto degli affari, e Federico U. Mion, economista laureato in International Management con esperienza professionale nell’ambito della finanza aziendale e del controlling. Pertanto AION Masterpieces è in grado di fornire ai propri clienti, siano essi proprietari o acquirenti di opere d’arte di alto livello, una vasta gamma di servizi di altissima qualità, con lo stesso particolare riguardo sia agli aspetti storico-artistici e tecnici, che a quelli legali ed economici. Tali servizi spaziano dalla promozione e vendita di opere d’arte, al coordinamento di studi specifici su singole opere o intere collezioni; dal coordinamento di perizie e valutazioni, fino alla pianificazione di analisi scientifiche e di interventi di restauro in collaborazione con esperti del settore a livello internazionale. Dal momento che le esigenze del cliente vanno spesso al di là dell’assistenza in ambito culturale e scientifico, AION Masterpieces gestisce con la medesima attenzione e cura anche i connessi aspetti legali e amministrativi quali la contrattualistica in ambito di transazioni di opere d’arte, le soluzioni assicurative, la scelta del deposito, la logistica dei trasporti e i relativi permessi di importazione e esportazione. L’amore e l’attenzione per l’arte vengono quindi protetti da un’adeguata struttura legale e sorretti da un’accurata valutazione economica. Parallelamente al Fine Art Management, il desiderio di AION Masterpieces è quello di poter divulgare e valorizzare tutte quelle esperienze artistiche, contemporanee e non, nate da un desiderio creativo genuino, e che, proprio perché capaci di suscitare emozioni, di coinvolgere e di comunicare, meritano di essere conosciute e apprezzate: meritano dunque il giusto “spazio”. Esporre in una galleria determinate opere è tuttavia un concetto eccessivamente riduttivo per definire lo “spazio” che AION Masterpieces ha deciso di dedicare all’arte. Molto più di una semplice vetrina sulla città, AION Art Space è innanzitutto un’idea che prende forma non solo attraverso uno spazio di valorizzazione (un locale espositivo in pieno centro a Lugano) ma anche tramite uno spazio di azione (promozione tramite eventi, pubblicazione di cataloghi, ecc.). AION Art Space nasce quindi per fare sì che siano le opere a parlare per gli artisti stessi, perché creare spazio vuol dire soprattutto dare voce a tutte le espressioni del genio creativo umano nelle arti visive, siano esse pittura, scultura, grafica, installazioni, performances, videoarte o quant’altro. In quest’ottica è quindi un grande onore per AION Art Space presentare la mostra dal titolo Life is Beautiful. La pittura energica, solare e dinamica di Paola Buratto Caovilla, prodotta in perfetta sintonia con la personalità della sua creatrice, ci è sembrata l’emblema di quella positività ed intraprendenza creativa di cui AION Art Space vuole farsi portatore e promotore.
AION Masterpieces is a company specialized in Fine Art Management implementing a business concept based on three synergic competence areas: artworks, legal issues, and economics. “Artworks” is a very specific field and in a world undergoing continuous globalization processes, it requires the development of specific technical competences and a flawless quality service. AION Masterpieces relates directly to the customers thanks to the interactions with a team of skilled professionals: Claudio Metzger, art historian and expert; Maria Elisa Giorgi, art historian, Fabrizio P. Mion, attorney at law with specialization in civil and business law; and Federico U. Mion, post-graduate economist with a degree in International Management and a professional background in the field of corporate finance and controlling. Therefore, AION Masterpieces can supply a vast range of superior quality services to all customers, regardless of whether they are the owners or the buyers of high-end art pieces. All services are hinged on special care for artistic, historic and technical issues as well as legal and economic ones. Our service spectrum extends from the marketing and sale of artworks, to the coordination of individual works or entire collections; from the coordination of expert reports up to the planning of scientific analysis and restoration interventions in collaboration with international experts. As customers’ requirements are often beyond cultural and scientific services, AION Masterpieces dedicates equal care and attention to both legal and administrative implications such as the drafting of art work contracts, and assistance for insurance coverage, choice of warehouses, logistics and transportation services as well as related import and export permits. We protect art by an efficient legal organization and accurate economic evaluations. Alongside Fine Art Management, AION Masterpieces aims at spreading and valuing all art experiences including contemporary and modern artworks stemming out of a genuine creative mind, capable of triggering emotions and involvement, capable of communicating and finally deserving appreciation and recognition, because every artwork deserves a right “place”. “Art gallery” is quite a simple way to define the “space” that AION Masterpieces has decided to dedicate to art. AION Art Space is much more than a window on the city. It is above all, an idea that takes shape through a valuable space such as the showroom in downtown Lugano, as well as an effective planning activity (promotion events, publication of catalogues, etc.). AION Art Space was incorporated to help the artists speak through their works but also to voice all and any expressions of creative minds at any level of the visual fields: from painting to sculpture, graphics, installations, performances, video clips and more. For this reason, we at AION Art Space are proud to host Life is Beautiful. The forceful, solar, and dynamic painting of Paola Buratto Caovilla, is a perfect emblem of the personality of the artist as well as a best match to the positive and entrepreneurial activity carried out by AION Art Space.
AION MASTERPIECES S.A. - FEDERICO U. MION CHAIRMAN
LIFE
IN L U C A
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SHOE
B E AT R I C E
The third version of the cover of Some Girls, the great Rolling Stones album released in 1978, depicts a close up of a woman’s foot inside a very high, black patent shoe. This image, according to Mick Jagger, is the epitome of sexuality. The shoe, in fact, has been a fetish for men and women throughout all times, from the tiny Chinese lotus to the most in-vogue models of the Western culture. Wrapped in pumps, ballerina flats, high-heel shoes or sandals, feet in proper footwear are definitely a matter of indisputable aesthetic interest, and much more! The French novelist, Restif de la Bretonne, was the first who pinpointed the sexual implications of feet and footwear, using the name of “retifism” to describe the erotic interest aroused by feet, either bare or shoe-clad. In 1769, in his novel “Le pied de Fanchette” he writes: “I am like King Dauphin and Thévenard who could not remain insensitive to a pretty woman’s foot.” It would take much more than a full page to list all the “retifists” who populate the history of arts, literature, films and photography. Topping the list is Director Quentin Tarantino whose casting for “Kill Bill” called explicitly for aspiring Black Mambas (Uma Thurman finally got the part of the protagonist) to appear with sandals or flip flops and show off the shape of their legs. Among contemporary artists, Vanessa Beecroft was the first one to use a shoe as the sole accessory for her nude models clustered together in a refined, vivant and icastic tableaux. And what to say of Christine Gallmetzer‘s collection made up of a thousand pairs of shoes of friends and artists, photographed and repainted. Or the private collection of Sylvie Fleury, transformed in a cool gallery of ready-made in the era of global shopping. Nothing can equal the charm of the woman masterly portrayed by Paola Caovilla Buratto in those twelve-inch high-heel shoes, uplifting beauty and temperament. Her name is linked to the famous family-owned fashion house that has become so wellknown all over the world. Her experiments are style essays, hyperbolic inventions dealing with shoes as with a real object of desire, and tout court seduction. After so much researching, painting just seems to be a natural conclusion, allowing her the freedom of experimenting, far from the constraints dictated by the wearer’s requirements. Before getting involved with painting, Paola Caovilla did a lot of drawing work following the young Andy Warhol, who was moving his first steps in the New York of the 50’s combining the passion for fashion with the ambition of becoming a real artist. She designed many delightful water paintings, which are like scattered sheets with thought fragments collected in valuable monographs or on pages of illustrated diaries. Warhol was particularly keen on wearing the right clothes for the right occasion. This soon gained him the nickname of “Cinderella” reminding us of the well-known story of the shoe left on the steps of the palace, waiting for a charming prince to go and search for the matching shoe. The style of Paola Buratto Caovilla isn’t just a question of trends. It does not depend on fashion or anything lasting less than a season.
Her ideas embody modernity and classicism and are popular without chasing the news. In short, her style is a mix of cultural wisdom and authentic know-how, staring at the mystery of nature and its colour temperatures, its fractals erupting into shapes and geometric patterns of flowers, leaves, and fruits, the predictable but always fascinating temporal sequencing of seasons and climates, forming a glossary of representations that are realistic but also transformable in many ways. It is worth recalling Heidegger’s philosophy and his debate on Van Gogh painting of a pair of shoes, (1886) in his writing “The artwork sources” containing aesthetic theories on the “truth of representations.” This painting depicts the worn, dirty, deformed shoes of a peasant, the least noble and auratic character we can think of. Yet, to put it in Balzac’s words, a single shoe can tell the story of a lifetime. As the humble footwear of Van Gogh turns out to be an important document for the reconstruction of the culture of his age, the appealing shoes of Paola Caovilla Buratto are pictorial expressions of an everyday item that is part of our contemporary world. An accessory can actually express the spirit of its time in the best way, sometimes even better than a face or a landscape. In this series of her paintings, where the shoe is the protagonist, there lies the double character of a woman and a girl, like the “queen-child” in the famous portrait of Sophia Coppola in Marie Antoinette where a dauphiness full of malice, played by Kirsten Dunst, frolicked in bunches of colourful shoes, fine food and wine in the magnificent halls of Versailles. However, Paola’s Venetian backgrounds lost in the maze of some eighteenth-century mansion decorated by Tiepolo and illustrated by Longhi or Guardi, have very little to envy the French palace. As a direct descendant of Giovanni Piazzetta, Paola grew up nourished by the gaze of golden Venice, a piece of this planet that is not only Italy’s but a world heritage, an incomparable venue that has no territorial traits, the first gate to the East, a blend of styles, languages and shapes that cannot fail to influence those who were so lucky to live there, even only for a short period. If the choice of a subject somehow results out of her professional experience, the choice of Venice is an essential, psychological, existential condition of pure love. These early paintings mark the debut of this totally creative woman and artist: Paola Caovilla Buratto processes her inspiration into watercolours through gold, the dominant colour of a fragmented mark distributed with wide strokes, outlining the shapes by means of a few layers of colour. You can tell the lyrical striving of expressionism in a riot of purple, red, green, an abstract bacchanal unveiling the influence of the Greek mythology lessons, with the iconography of Hermes and his winged cassocks, along with the Dionysian pleasure for the lifeblood contained in nature. Without hesitation and with courage, Paola’s work synthesizes a witticism full of positivity and trust, a declaration of poetry that she strongly desired as the title for the exhibition and a good omen for the next challenge: “Life is Beautiful.”
L uca B eatrice lives and works in T urin . H e is A critic of contemporary art and curator of m A N Y e X P O S ition S . H e ha S reali z ed catalogues and monographs F O R show S of important italian and foreign artists .
V ISUA L M A R I E
A LCHEMIES L A U R E
Paola Caovilla has been working for years producing seductive pieces for the field of aesthetics, costume history, and for women. These objects are shoes worn by multi-ethnic feet that walk and dance; luxurious pairs of shoes that magnificently make legs longer and slimmer, and their wearers smart and glamorous. The shoes created by Caovilla are loved also by refined and generous men who like to look at their women wearing shoes and choose for them the most creative models. After years of living and dedication to the creation of women accessories, Paola Caovilla heads to a new horizon searching for profound time regeneration and devoting herself to the production of her works and dreams. This reminds me of a quote of the philosopher Gaston Bachelard: “We must recall our childhood dreams to enjoy their full poetic momentum.” Paola’s artwork has Venetian roots and takes its inspiration also from eighteenth-century master, Piazzetta. Her parents were far-seeing entrepreneurs with a humanistic culture who gifted Paola with love for everyday business merging the pleasure of practical work and artistic studies and knowledge. Her life in Venice, a city of unique beauty offering the world the enjoyment of its architectural, sculptural, and visual treasures, fosters her spirit: - While freely wandering through the elegant open spaces between canals, Istria stones, marbles and precious Byzantine stones, mosaics of gold and oriental blues, the artist takes possession of a sense for quality materials and then reproduces it in her paintings on the canvas.
PA N N ò
In the works on display, Caovilla feels the need for the use of gold that she doesn’t use as a colour, but as light of the spirit and of a generous soul. Getting lost in the glare of gold as if gold possessed a soul, in the solitude of searching and waiting for that creative idea... approaching complementary colours on the canvas with a supple palette knife, enjoying the pleasure of the sonance of the rubbing of the surface: the vision of the works makes you feel like caressing colours with a look. In Andersen’s fairy tale, the glass slipper is lost... and Cinderella will find it. Paola Caovilla will never leave the original shape of her creations, it is a memory of an auto-biographical, creative joy and she will not betray it. In her paintings, the shape becomes a mark, nearly as a great logo painted with her eyes shut, drawing it out of her memory so that nothing gets lost. The brushstrokes are light, pearly, transparent stone decors and oriental colours moving like bells that swing and dong in the airy space of the canvas. Blossoms wrapping unperceivable ankles: the body is not there, but a full-bodied painting replaces it. Watercolours on thick papers that sound like drums and bronze gongs. The water paint on the white paper background is enriched with light touches of any colour with cheerful rhythms and musical ramblings. The show is the beginning of a long path, very generous and full of surprises. Paola’s blog has aroused a great interest for multimedia applications but Paola approaches it with scientific competence for the making of the video that brings us into a world of new images and an interesting visual journey.
M A R I E L aur E P ann ò was born in V enice but lives and works in M ilan . S he studied in V enice and graduated from the A ccademia delle B elle A rti with a degree in painting . S he took part in prestigious collective and personal expositions in I taly and abroad .
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