Paola Valenzano
We had the opportunity to meet the artist Paola Valenzano during the screening of the filmLunàdigas, or women without children in her studio L’arte perfetta in Rome, and from this meeting the new virtual exhibition space of Lunàdigas prendo pArte took life.
«I was born under the Roman sun in August 1971 and perhaps for this reason the first word I pronounced is “yellow”.
I am driven by a great curiosity and my real strengths are the questions. I studied different techniques and disciplines with a flair for artistic, anthropological and psychological ones.
After graduating in Anthropology at Sapienza University in Rome and studying Art Restoration, I worked for a few years on the conservation and restoration of works of art, where I learned to value the time of care, transformation and the much needed patience. The knowledge of Native Art was the most powerful reference to my artistic activity, started in my thirties, after studying – among other things – wood sculpture, photography, engraving, plastic and moulding. Since then, I have taken part in several collective and personal exhibitions, especially in the independent cultural circuits.
My course is versatile and always changing and is dictated by intuition, when I manage not to interfere with it.
Over time, the research has turned, on the one hand, towards more intimate and symbolic themes, integrating psychological investigation and family memories, also appropriating the use of techniques traditionally belonging to the female universe such as sewing, embroidery and weaving; on the other hand, towards broader and more general and somehow universal themes. I am committed to removing the personal and collective conditioning, the internalised ones, those that hide extremely well between the folds of the mind, customs and traditions. I am more and more interested in Participatory Art and its developments.
I follow a natural inclination to bring things from the two-dimensionality of mental vision to the three-dimensionality by creating “symbolic objects”, as the surrealists would say. I savour peace when my hands are feverishly at work and feel fulfilled when something that has manifested in my mind materializes, so that it can be shared with others.
The gaze, interaction or collaboration of others “completes” the work and keeps it alive.
A recurring theme is that of the container, the shelter, the border. The theme of the house and the dialectics inward-outward. The material and immaterial boundaries between the self and the others and between the private self and the public self.
In parallel, for several years I enjoyed building a singular and ironic personal cosmogony, made of fabric aliens, bird women, totems, spaceships and time machines.
Recently I graduated in Art for Therapy at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, developing a traveling workshop in the company of the Chance: The Aesthetic Walk inspired by the great social teaching of situationist and phenomenological practices on the one hand, and by the great potential of breaking habits and routine that resides in the Practice of Presence on the other. Chance, error and play are fundamental ingredients. At the heart f it, the relationship with the unusual self and with the otherness, the environment, whether a thing or person.
I am fascinated by coincidences, by chance and error and by the possibility of being integrated into art and life. I suspect they may conceal the presence of the Creator and may reveal some of the most interesting things in life.
If the most authentic freedom is in the Presence-in-the-Present, paraphrasing the quote from a famous film I could say that: “there’s no moment like this moment, so This must be The Moment”».
Paola Valenzano
Paola Valenzano website: https://www.paolavalenzano.it/
