Paris Past

Hommage à Gaston de Pawlowski

Michelangelo Penso
Solo show

Working in a space between art and science, Penso’s pieces are conceived to be understood both in the macro aesthetic and in the micro aesthetic domain. His sculptures and installation are clearly and objectively perceived, but they also recall the other senses, indeed, creating different connections and images in our brain. All his consideration is about memory: the memory of a past life in a distant place (as for the drawn moleskins series) or the memory of a genetic and biological form (as for his latest works), to be continuously changed and modify.
For this exhibition, Michelangelo Penso chose to pay tribute to the French writer Gaston de Pawlowski, who inspired Marcel Duchamp in his artwork The Large Glass, referring to Chapter XXXIII of his novel Journey to the land of the Fourth dimension (1912), in which he speaks about giant bacterium.
As a metaphor of the human condition and its fragility, a giant sculpture (Physarum polycephalum, 2013) invades, in a disturbing way, the gallery space from the first to the second floor, opened and inaugurated on this occasion.