Paolo Gasparini. Landscapes of Death
Rethymno, January – 2nd February 2003
Organized by
Rethymno Centre for Contemporary Art
Rethymno Centre for Contemporary Art (today Contemporary Art Museum of Crete) presented in the ground floor of “L. Kanakakis” Municipal Gallery the exhibition entitled “Landscapes of Death” by Paolo Gasparini.
The artist’s trilogy “Landscapes of Death” comprised of the works “Il corpo di Tina”, a 9-meter-long photo mural, “El Rostro Barrido”, 7 meters long, and the photo mural “Il corpo del Che”.
The photo mural about Che was exhibited as part of the exhibition “Che Guevara’s Death” which was still on in Artspace “8” during that period with great success. The exhibition, organized by Rethymno Centre for Contemporary Art in cooperation with the University of Crete and the State Museum of Contemporary Arts, and curated by Nikos Chatzinikolaou, was open to the public until the 2nd of February 2003.
The three amazing photo murals by Paolo Gasparini, “Il corpo del Che”, “Il corpo di Tina” and “El Rostro Barrido”, were a classification of memory images through photographs that the artist has borrowed from archives and newspapers he had worked on and exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1995 and in Venezuela exhibition stand where he was hosted along with Sammy Cucher, curated by Tahia Rivero. He had also taken part in the director Jean Clair’s exhibition “Identity and Alterity” at Palazzo Grassi.
The photo mural “Il corpo del Che” was created in 1993, the second photo mural “Il corpo di Tina” also in 1993 and the third one “El Rostro Barrido” in 1995.
Thus, the new astonishing exhibition of Rethymno Centre for Contemporary Art, with the presence of the two new photo murals in the ground floor of the Municipal Gallery, completed the trilogy of Gasparini’s landscapes of death, and the visitor had the chance to get a complete picture of the artist’s work and mindset.
Deeply politicized, Gasparini, a follower of photographic realism since the 1950s, worked on what he described as a “blow to his aesthetic and political beliefs”, revealing the man and his surroundings as eyewitnesses of the transformations recorded over time. The Italian artist who chose to live and work in Latin America proposed this trilogy as a story of violence, on which the symbolic mantle of death rituals is brought forward. His works, where one can spot Che Guevara, Tina Montotti, Emiliano Zapata, Trotsky, Lenin, Diego Rivera, identify famous figures and deaths that occurred at different times during the last century.
Gasparini talks about existence and oppression, the failure of political utopias that were expelled prematurely or born without life, the death of their ideals, all these 19th-century plans that expired by the end of the 20th century. The artist himself points out that his intention is to dig up a mummified iconography – funerary, frozen like the photograph itself – and bring to light memories we must not forget.
