The sterile wrap drawing its imponent figure on the Naviglio shores is one of the many architectonic eclecticism populating the city of Milan. The Pecci Museum tears open with its cold ratio the surrounding area, establishing a sort of osmosis, an intrinsic presence in the void.
Penetrating the crude unembellished space of this ex industrial settlement, the crystallised reality of Paolo Grassino receives us ambiguously, weaving a subtle perception in between the dreamlike and a concrete state. On a lost earthy plateau a monumental group of wolves progresses threatening. Their aluminium bodies stifle the tension in movement for long instants, quivering of a dynamic, static nature. Deep into this dystopic dimension, there’s nothing but a feeble, eroded track of human presence, metallic corpses, fallen symbols of his artificial supremacy. Among the sand, forming a coarse-grained film upon the reversed cars, we noticed the Fiat symbol, reference to the Turinese origins of the author, possibly lucid association with the current financial crisis. The spectator stands still, forced to look at Analgesia from an alienating distance, intimately attracted as with the unreachable mirage in the desert. The man is suspended into his finite condition, at the mercy of events, carrying him in their defiant cyclical course. It is the puppet of Controllo del Corpo, a shadow without identity, caged in her self-same prison. The brain , stabbed and anaesthetised, follows the casual movements of inert limbs, kept in rhythm by an everlasting loop of metallic sounds.
Gravity swallows the dormant soul.
In front of this troublesome and tragic reflection, hands rise up for failure. Resa microscopically reproduces our tactile organs, emphasising anatomy with obsessive precision. The four diptych in acrylic painting as if they were cave art pieces, bring us back to a primordial state, dark and cavernous, where the human being, afraid of the outer world, used to explore himself. But in the hands altogether with the dejection of the end there is the power of the beginning, running through the venous network of the body, progressively filling the footprint to which the Future is given back.
Grassino sets up a winding, cathartic journey the visitor travels through dazed and absorbed, from which he eventually recovers, spiritually enriched.
