March 22, 2007 at Lattuada Studio, Milan, Italy
by Francesca Alfano
Georges Perec’s most famous book is probably “Life, instructions for use” in which he methodically describes the lives of the various inhabitants of an apartment block, following a circular pattern (the knight pattern, based on the knight’s move in the game of chess). The protagonist of the book is the millionaire Bartlebooth who resolves “in the face of the inextricable incoherence of things, [...] to execute a (necessarily limited) program right the way through, in all its irreducible, intact entirety [...] that his whole life would be organized around a single project, an arbitrarily constrained program with no purpose outside its own completion”. And so he starts off, at the age of 20, to carry out his project: for 10 years, despite not having the slightest interest in it, he learns the art of water-painting, and then for 20 years he travels the world, painting a “seascape” on sheets of Whatman paper, then sending each water-paint to a specialist craftsman who, after gluing the water painting onto a wooden board, build a 750-piece puzzle; lastly, in the 20 years following his return to France, Bartlebooth puts back together the wooden puzzles, one every 15 days and in the order in which they were created. The paintings, then detach from their wooden support and put back together as if they were the original works thanks to a special substance, are then sent back to the places in which they were painted and then dipped “in a detergent solution whence would emerge a clean an unmarked sheet of Whatman paper. Thus no trace would remain of an operation which would have been, throughout a period of fifty years, the sole motivation and unique activity of its author.” An extraordinary tale of fragility and power, of visible and invisible, of real and imaginary… And it is on this plain of fragility and projection that we come across the powerful artistic vision of Angiola Churchill. Paper is just one of the many ways to narrate the human story as it flits between the physical and the mental stages of life. Through paper, men and women fall in love, tell their own stories, recognize themselves and then lose themselves forever. And it is with paper that Angiola Churchill puts together series of worlds in which a complex and erudite world materials through her slow and painstaking work, constituting an unexpected artistic approach, a choice of language which offers a new relationship both with matter and space. In Angiola Churchill’s works, the fantastical dimensions of invention are emphasized, along with those of style and of stylistic arrangement, to form a daring polyphonic ensemble, played out on the ambivalence of the underlying concepts. An all-engulfing theory of possible worlds, toying with numerous self references throughout her installations. Following this new train of thought, Angiola Churchill’s world shows itself to be infinite, resting on a discursive vortex, one in which the grace of the dreamlike imagination comes through with great force. Her approach is all played out in terms of “lightness”, and the work thus becomes a “projection of desire”. Lightness, Rapidity, Exactitude, Visibility, Multiplicity, Consistency. These are the categories chosen by Italo Calvino in his American Lessons, and which also seem to be the key binding elements of Angiola Churchill’s work. Despite being somewhat unusual categories, far from the common aesthetic canons, they are typical of the way of conceiving the language and works that Angiola Churchill has long made part of her artistic nature. The elements with which Angiola Churchill works, apart from paper material itself, i.e. lightness, rapidity, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity and consistency, are to be found both in her works and in her own lifestyle, categories of the interpretation of reality and of the self, in a self-declared stance towards the world. Since 1984, Angiola Churchill has put together complete environments consisting of weavings, inlays and embroideries, all out of paper, complete worlds of paper in which to walk, to look, to cross, to think, to imagine…. A sort of narration as a means of capturing time, a well-defined and well-calculated design of the work, reflecting a rational and disenchanted approach to reality through flawless reasoning. The ability to produce mental images, to structure an argument along with that autonomy of judgment which offers protection from conditioning. The awareness of the complexity of the multitude of visions of the world overflows into her life, like a form of curiosity which describes her intellectual development through a wide range of fields of knowledge. Angiola Churchill’s installations seem to turn the most complex issues of our time into a story of artistic transfiguration, only to become a story based on the world and the self and the relationships between the self and the world. Thus Angiola Churchill creates real paths of development, part made up of a complex intertwining of citations, of allusion. A multifaceted network of references in her work allows us not only to discover the density hidden within the texture of the paper, but also to explore its tension through sudden brainwaves, intuitions, inspirations, and table-turning. Angiola Churchill has never repeated herself; she has never returned to already-used patterns or forms. Each of her works in entirely unique: a visual tale without images, able to expose a detailed and poetic discourse on the contemporary world poised between the power and fragility of her work. Thus the lightness is double-edged: it is both a narrative model and a lifestyle. It is well-known how much care Angiola gives to her works, her painstaking attention to delicate geometrical shapes, to correspondences, symmetries, the structural framework and the stylistic lightness. It is known how she leaves nothing to chance, including her lightness. It is as if Angiola’s installations were a macro-text to be considered only as a whole, in the intertwining of symmetries and correspondences to be found within each portion, but they should also be considered in terms of the sometimes evident yet usually subtle references to be found between the various elements of the ensemble. The structure of the installation, chosen by her - just as her themes are - frames the entire cycle and lays out the key points to it, thus cracking open slowly like a seashell, little by little revealing the pearl it withholds. And it is first and foremost the dimension of an art as an answer to the weight of living which comes through, ranging 360 degrees across the various forms of contemporary art, which Angiola knows down to the last detail. Angiola Churchill’s installations follow and reconstruct the thread which transversally brings together art’s ability to build new worlds, putting together a new mapping of the visual world, one in which the concepts are not formed by opposing pairs, where lightness may not be told from heaviness, fast may not be told from slow, precise from blurred, light form dark, much from little, or inside out.