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opera di Paolo Ceribelli con soldatini di plastica

The game of toy soldiers. Paolo Ceribelli

Text by Cristina Trivellin on Paolo Ceribelli

..it seems to me that life is equivalent to instability, to imbalance. Yet it is the fixity of its forms that makes it possible… G. Bataille

Sometimes I think that certain works need less than others the support of a critical text and that indeed, the latter might mislead their meaning. In Paolo Ceribelli’s case we are not faced with signs to interpret or gestures to translate. His works go directly to the center of our observing, between the hypnotic and the violent, the beautiful and the ironic, the playful and the damnably serious; they connect to our thinking, to ideas about society, consumerism, war, and the discomfort we stifle daily. At the same time they thread their way into our perceiving, flushing out new dynamics, suited to contemporary feeling, with insight, intelligence and growing awareness. One cannot escape the maturity and consistency of this artist, the strength and clarity in the use of the medium, but also the trajectory of deliberate ambiguities, expressed contradictions that leave every reading open.

Paul has always loved to draw and create, in a constant and never interrupted attitude, even if he does not follow an academic course of study; but you know, there are many paths, and after all, having studied political science plays a fundamental role in his artistic and intellectual stance. After several experiments on two-dimensional media – mainly collages in which he expressed his visions of global society – since 2006 he began working with plastic toy soldiers.

The theme is developed and leads to the production we observe.

The game of toy soldiers, a favorite pastime of children from a wide variety of social, cultural and generational backgrounds, is far from harmless, as are most of the team games that are still part of the lives of young and old alike. Needless to deny that many of them are characterized by varying doses of brutality. Paolo Ceribelli tenfold and underscores these valences by immersing anthropomorphic sculptures in monochromatic baths and making them rise to unwitting protagonists of his works, massing them, unifying them, arranging them on the canvas until they form maps and territories, flags and alignments, targets and playing fields. There is a gesturality in the manipulation of matter and especially in arranging the toy soldiers on the canvas to which the artist gives great importance, because in this “making” every structure takes on meaning and every spatiality embodies variations of values.

Paul’s works are plastic, three-dimensional, and trespass the classical frontal fruition in order to be experienced in visions from multiple points of view, whether caught in optical or conceptual meaning.

Interesting, in my opinion, is the bird’s-eye view from above, which is essential for understanding their gestalt construction and their proper proportion. I like in this case to recall one of the laws of Gestalt (coincidentally, the law of common destiny) which states the tendency to perceive as belonging to a single object the things that move together, at the same time and in the same direction: the masses, taken as a whole, assume a single identity.

Identity given in this case to the armies that move and focus on Paolo Ceribelli’s canvases and vary, from work to work, their distribution and density. In the earliest works the toy soldiers are few and larger, as in the No tank you series, where tanks appear and an entirely explicit message; in Globe trotters, on the other hand, they become tiny and thicken so much that they cover the canvas and form globes.

We come to see the little soldiers with their weapons pointed at one target, as if they had only one chance, that one chance.

There is indeed a moment in Ceribelli’s production when the sense of inevitability, of an obligatory course and point of no return, is most strongly felt, reaching its climax in the War Time series: 17 small pieces, frozen clocks where in each scanned second a different war scene takes place. Impossible to look away and think. In the Bersagli the ambivalence in the title itself is played out, but also expressed, on a formal and purely artistic level, is the tribute to Jasper Johns’ celebrated Bersagli of the 1970s.

With the most recent Spirals, the path from physical reality to cathartic abstraction in the realm of Form is clearly delineated, where denunciation and actuality give way, almost in fading, to art and artisticity, in pursuit of the latter as generating centers of other possibilities and energies. And then color, alienating, abstract, brilliant. A color that starts with the black-white alternation, passes through the iconographic reality of stars and stripes in the case of the flags, until it becomes garish and monochromatic in the spirals, almost echoing the chromatic and plastic tones of Bonalumi or Castellani, where the everted effect is given by the shadow of the toy soldiers on the canvas. The latter, in the indistinct and alternating figure-background synthesis, lose their identity in entering a form that moves away from deployment, from massed arrangement. They are archetypal figures, rock drawings.

Irradiations. Expansions.

Shapes and colors dialoguing in a register that does not forget the previous ones but lightens them, creating space even for art for art’s sake, play for play’s sake.

All of this rich and articulate production begins with an emblematic work, Take Me Home. A supermarket trolley chock-full of little white soldiers who, piled up like Saturday groceries, ask to return to life, or mercenaries who choose (but will they then have any other choice?) the safe job of the army, then bought by power and brought in the trolley/trolley to die without knowing the logic behind the war they fought. A modern War Memorial of the third millennium. But in the B-side it is also the work that speaks, with its caption-cartoon inserted in the trolley, asking to be taken, grasped, adopted by someone who wants to own it, buy it, yes, as one buys and desires everything, including art.

Then what does the desire for accumulation lead to?

To posterity the arduous judgment. Because Paolo Ceribelli much prefers questions and disenchantment to answers and rhetoric. He chooses that estrangement that leads him to freeze easy demagoguery in the name of a synthesis that inevitably shifts the burden of answers to those who dare the gaze, aware that battles, today, are conducted on different terrain than those beaten by previous generations. They are conducted “from within,” not “from without.” The artist, no longer isolated and marginalized by an accusing world but immersed up to his neck, also responsible, but aware. And excuse me for saying so.

Discover the artworks by Paolo Ceribelli: https://www.rossettiartecontemporanea.en/artist/ceribelli-paolo/