Paolo Grassino at Giorgio Persano - Turin - Brief Article

Six miles outside Turin, the statue of a watchful stag stands atop Stupinigi, the 18th-century hunting lodge of the House of Savoy. That prominent and paradoxical icon of prey triumphant, as well as the aristocratic connotations of the art of tapestry, may have been on the mind of Paolo Grassino as he fashioned spongy PVC sheets into a multiroom installation in downtown Turin, "Perennial Themes" (2002), on the noble subject of the hunt.

The principal visual components were two 11-foot-high wall hangings. Perennial Themes--The Deer, more than 71 feet long, covered the walls in two of the gallery's rooms; 42 feet in length, Perennial Themes--The Dogs wrapped around the interior of a single space. Alert against a blue sky, poised to flee, doomed, the herd of stags and does was cut from yellow-gold PVC with red introduced for modeling. Contrasting with the deer's stillness, the pack of blue dogs, heavy-jowled and deep-chested, restlessly crisscrosses a dark green field. If the reductive color and radical simplification of form and landscape recall Matisse's The Dance, the interlocking of PVC segments evinces all the ingenuity of intarsia. Beyond taking full advantage of the bold contrasts of commercial color, Grassino exploited the less obvious tactile effect of the matting's corduroy texture, whose striations he angled or extended, like graphic hatching, to distinguish a dog's shadowed muzzle from the closely hued background or to suggest the broad expanse

Separating the two sets of protagonists was a spacious room, empty but for sound equipment, including eight speakers tucked high on the molding. In a sequence that repeatedly circled the space, the speakers projected the bone-crushing noise of a grinding machine at work. Fearsome and relentless, the audio penetrated the adjacent areas, where it seemed to ratchet up both the agitation of the dogs and the mortal anxiety of the deer.

The installation was augmented with smaller works, more readily marketable, to be sure, but neither superfluous nor ineffective. There was one of a series of three tondi (2002) that feature just the hounds along with four "Trophies" (2001), knobby, head-shaped sculptures, one resembling a taxidermed stag head, the rest far less literal, not unlike Arp's metamorphic "Human Concretions." Each is rendered in surgically white PVC wrapped over a polystyrene armature.

Born in 1967 and exhibiting for about 10 years, the Turin-based Grassino used the subject of the deer for smaller wall works in 2000 and 2001. In this expanded format, the theme matured into a meditation on the predatory aspect of social privilege. The hunt is not, after all, a phenomenon of nature but an exercise in ritualized violence, wherein the instincts of animals are manipulated for the amusement and aggrandizement of the powerful.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group