Exhibition view
Exhibition view
Valerio Nicolai, Crayons and acrylics on wood panels, performer Matite colorate e acrilici su pannelli di legno, performer 450 x 300 x 110 cm
Valerio Nicolai, Crayons and acrylics on wood panels, performer Matite colorate e acrilici su pannelli di legno, performer 450 x 300 x 110 cm
Valerio Nicolai, Crayons and acrylics on wood panels, performer Matite colorate e acrilici su pannelli di legno, performer 450 x 300 x 110 cm
Valerio Nicolai, Crayons and acrylics on wood panels, performer Matite colorate e acrilici su pannelli di legno, performer 450 x 300 x 110 cm
Valerio Nicolai, Crayons and acrylics on wood panels, performer Matite colorate e acrilici su pannelli di legno, performer 450 x 300 x 110 cm
Valerio Nicolai, Crayons and acrylics on wood panels, performer Matite colorate e acrilici su pannelli di legno, performer 395 x 300 x 150 cm
Valerio Nicolai, Crayons and acrylics on wood panels, performer Matite colorate e acrilici su pannelli di legno, performer 395 x 300 x 150 cm
Valerio Nicolai, Crayons and acrylics on wood panels, performer Matite colorate e acrilici su pannelli di legno, performer 395 x 300 x 150 cm
Since when I knew that I would have written the text accompaining this exhibition by Valerio I start- ed seeing foxes everywhere. This is curious because his works has starring foxes as subjects.
More precisely, it is human eyes that stare, probably placed at the right place of the skull of a person starring behind the two big betulla panels, mostly painted in crayons, depicting in fact two foxes; on their own with their tails, they wander on an endless ceramics floor fading in nothingness.
Even if I lingered for a moment on an anatomical aspect there is nothing itchy in the experience of stopping by Clima to see the exhibition; even if we do not focus on what the person on the other side might do while starring at you through your visit. You decide. With great clarity Valerio would want you to think about the foxes’ simplified psychological features and, as happening in fairy tales, he tailors them on human beings.
When foxes, by chance, accompany themselves to a feline softening the character’ s edges, we start talking of laxity, of lack of control on drive, and pure hedonism. We should not consider the cat and the fox guilty in Collodi’s novel: is the human being symbol of lie who is wreaking havoc. When instead it’s alone, the fox shows as a carrier of a both positive and negative feature: incapable of of accepting of having failed, but able to relativize the context of failure to its favor, tries to give as an excuse an aesthetically persuasive of its difficulties . We are talking of cleverness.
Recently, i bought some Bolgheri wine and I noticed having a fox on the label; I know nothing about it, but maybe affected by those thoughts, I found the wine properly refined.
Potentially we could consider the graft of human organs in the fox image as the result of a bestiality; nothing wrong, writing it I prove I thought about it first. But I do believe Valerio wanted to make the subjects of his paintings uncomfortable, lost and overwhelmed by panic as who is aware of being the last of his species.
— Alessandro Carano
