Kwai Fung Hin Art Gallery is pleased to present Image Outside of Time, the first solo exhibition in Asia of emerging Italian painter Paola Angelini, who is known for her symbolically loaded canvases filled with anachronistic atmosphere. Her aesthetics exudes a kind of quiet dissonance that at once encapsulates and destabilizes the viewer.
Angelini’s work peels back the layers of our mass media culture through the use of age-old symbols and metaphors in her oneiric images. This exhibition calls for a way of seeing and imagining that breaks away from our time-bound mind through Angelini's psychologically charged works.
Deeply fascinated by the spiritual power of ancient icons found in frescoes, medieval mosaics, antique sculptures and tapestries, the artist excavates symbols from these imageries to construct an alternate world independent of the timeline of our physical reality.
“I think that they are images that have a need to, at a certain point, emerge from a consciousness; they ask me to be represented.” – Paola Angelini
The atmospheric intensity Angelini creates through the treatment of tones and light elicits near-religious responses. Often working within a tight chromatic range around a dominant tone, the artist juxtaposes acid colors with earthy hues to create light that seems to emanate from within the figures.
“What I ask myself is actually what is worth to represent now.” – Paola Angelini
At once surreal and familiar, Angelini’s affective images insist teleological questions in image-making itself, asking the true values of our visual languages from the ancient past to the present. These images collapse time and space, creating a kind of void that is long buried inside each of us. Through her practice, Angelini asks, “what image is really worth to make? How can images guide me to the truth and beauty?”
There are more than one way to understand our reality other than math and data, and Angelini’s work has a way to tell us where to start. Immerse in a moment of silence to uncover your inner self often buried in the cacophony of the digital era.
