Works
Sculpture, photography, videos, documentaries, drawings and the spoken word: a plurality of languages used to narrate the human condition, the lives lived by others, often the outsiders.
Sculpture, photography, videos, documentaries, drawings and the spoken word: a plurality of languages used to narrate the human condition, the lives lived by others, often the outsiders.
Worksite, opened in 2017, on the architectures of work and of dwelling, the faces and words of those who, in contemporary times, inhabit the heritage of Ivrea, Industrial City of the 20th Century.
From the story of a political refugee, a victim of trafficking – from which the short film LIFELIE (2020) is derived – the artist unlocks a thought-provoking reflection on identity and freedom, the body and censorship and closeness and violence between people and cultures.
Original Act, a title that comes from afar. The biblical reference is to the Old Testament. Risoli’s underlying, undoubtedly reasonable, assumption is that the beginning of human history was not the original sin, but the original act, the desire for knowledge, which prompted the expulsion from Paradise.
Il lento cammino della conoscenza / The slow journey towards knowledge. Notes on recent work by Paola Risoli – Angela Madesani
Feeling the frame, imagining the sequence that articulates a process: an obvious concept if we refer to the great cinema, less obvious when a visual artist is about to engage with the syntax of film language. Even rarer if the artist does not focus on the video shot but uses materials that have been salvaged and reused many times over, creating a scenography that reveals the narrative potential within sculptural volumes and elements of installation. The eye which perceives – Gianluca Marziani
Risoli’s is an inviting bidonville, a shantytown that encourages us not to stop at appearances (the hardness and roughness of an old metal bin) but to go beyond, ‘inside’, to find unusual, disorienting, emotionally charged situations. This particular shantytown can teach us – like a Genet novel – that every human reality, even the humblest, most marginal and at first sight annoying, can hide its own special beauty and “richness”. (Vittorio Falletti)
Mental images, suspended worlds that lead the viewer into the heart of a new dimension, inside the legendary scenes of great filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Wim Wenders, Shirin Neshat, Pedro Almodóvar.
Used oil drums, images of Berlin, webcam projections, videos. Paola’s ‘alchemical process 2.0’, thanks also to technology, consists of actions of transformation creating an existential, philosopher’s dimension, which is each time surprising and profound. I’m Berlin – Vittorio Falletti
A multi-media work, composed of oil drums, photographs, software and webcam projections, designed in collaboration with Gilbert Perlein, director of MAMAC_Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nice, for the collective exhibition Bonjour Monsieur Matisse! Rencontre(s) with works by Andy Warhol, Roy Licthenstein, Tom Wesselmann, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Vezzoli.
Projects aimed at using art to express social distress, carried out with socially vulnerable people who suffer from alcohol addiction, drug abuse or mental fragility, and with female victims of abuse and violence. Individual and collective works for public spaces, in collaboration with the National Health Authority and other public and private entities, as well as therapeutic communities.