Home, 2023
contact c-print from 4x5” negative on Fuji Chrystal Archive papaer, 36x27x3cm (framed)

About twelve or thirteen years ago my mother came home with a tableau depicting four hearts and hung it in the kitchen. It is an object that has always caught my attention - for its dissonance with the other furnishings, and for the sentimentalism it expresses, almost obscene, tender. Going through numerous removals and different placements, it has slowly taken root in my imagination as a kind of domestic icon, a synaptic shortcut for a set of feelings that is hard to define - melancholy, affection, guilt. I wanted to portray it as I happened to see it one day, on the veranda. This seemingly marginal placement actually reaffirmed its power - it was still there.

Exhibitions:

Cuore (solo), 2023, MarktStudio, Bologna

Ph. Carlo Favero


Caro Paolo, cosa volevi migliorare?, 2023
letter, 27x36x3cm (framed)

This letter, received in 2020, refers to an episode that occurred seven years earlier when I had accidentally stumbled upon one of Scientology’s Milan offices. Dianetics, the multi-volume work of Ron L. Hubbard, theorizes the possibility of a radical renewal, a “spiritual path” to the ultimate resolution of ills, of body as well as mind, based on dissociation from one’s traumas. I bought a volume of Hubbard’s work. Perhaps something had seduced me, or perhaps, simply, I thought, I don’t believe in all this, but I might still find something useful in it.

This episode, reoccurring years later in the form of a letter, awakened in me a sense of embarrassment. I had not thought about Scientology for a long time, in fact I stopped thinking about it as early as a week after I bought Dianetics. And yet, the literalness of the question stated in the letter continues to fascinate me - dear Paolo, what were you trying to improve?

Exhibitions:

Exhibitions:

Cuore (solo), 2023, MarktStudio, Bologna

Ph. Carlo Favero


fruits, 2023-ongoing

fruits is a cycle of ephemeral works made by tattooing trauma and words to exorcise on apples and pears. During the exhibition time, apples and pears are subjected to a process of organic degradation, thus accomplishing what could be called a sublimation - of the trauma, as well as of the body on which it is inscribed. Each work takes, from time to time, its title from the sequence of tattooed words, forming a kind of litany.

Exhibitions:

2023 Castello a orologeria, Castello di Andraz (BL), curated by Dolomiti Contemporanee
2023 Data Mining, duo exhibition w/ Lorenzo Lunghi, La Rada, Locarno, curated by Tommaso Gatti & Yimei Zhang

Press: 

KubaParis

Pictures:

1 Installtion view at Data Mining, 2023, La Rada, Locarno
2-3  Self-doubt, Sex-addiction, Anorexia, 2023, glass and steel table, tattooed Kanzi apples 75x34x50cm
4 Anger, Ex-boyfriend, Depression, Paranoia, 2023 glass and steel table, tattooed Kaiser pears 75x34x50cm

Ph: Tiziano Ercoli & Riccardo Giancola


Y , 2023
borosilicate glass, hydrochloric acid, water, milk tooth 48x80x1,8cm

Y is a series of borosilicate glass works, each of which contains, sealed, a baby tooth dipped in an acid solution. Each of the Ys includes the name of the tooth’s owner in the title. Over time, the acid solution will consume the tooth until it disappears. The work hints at a form of presence linked to the invisible - although dissolved, the tooth, continues to “be there”- and at an idea of time transformed, but never fully obliterated. Similarly, in European folklore, the fallen tooth is placed under the pillow for the fairy to pick up, leaving a coin in its place. Fallen teeth thus serve as a conduit for a dialogue with an invisible and magical elsewhere, while marking the stages of leaving childhood.

The work was made possible by the kind cooperation of Dr. Andrea Jouve and the Department of Chemistry, University of Turin

Exhibitions:

2023 Data Mining, duo exhibition w/ Lorenzo Lunghi, La Rada, Locarno, curated by Tommaso Gatti & Yimei Zhang
2023 IMAGINA - XXVII Biennale di Gubbio, Palazzo Ducale, Gubbio, curated by Spazio Taverna (Marco Bassan, Ludovico Pratesi)

Press:

KubaParis

Pictures:

1-3 Y (Luca), installtion views at Data Mining, 2023, La Rada, Locarno, curated by Tommasi Gatti & Yimei Zhang
4-5 Y (Luca); Y (unidentified); Y (Paolo); Y (Alessandra), installation views at  IMAGINA - XXVII Biennale di Gubbio, Palazzo Ducale, Gubbio, curated by Spazio Taverna (Marco Bassan, Ludovico Pratesi)


Ph: Tiziano Ercoli & Riccardo Giancola (1-3), Gianluca Benedetti (4-5)



beloved, 2023 
solo exhibition at Gelateria Sogni di Ghiaccio, Bologna
Curation and text by Condylura (Paolo Gabriotti, Davide Visintainer)

beloved continues a dialogue begun in 2021 between the artist Paolo Bufalini (Rome, 1994) and the curatorial/editorial duo Condylura around the notion of excavation. Drawing on his own and the partner’s memories and biographical materials, the exhibition presents different declinations of the deep in the affective and temporal, informatic and mineral fields, contrasting the sentimentality of the subjects with the extractive logic it enacts.

Alongside two new productions made for the exhibition, beloved presents an unseen photographic work, born from the collaboration with Marcello Galvani and part of the project Land of Nod, dedicated to the hybridization between digital production and physical space. The project is curated by Treti Galaxie, who contributes to the exhibition with a text in curatorial dialogue: From the dream experiments collection.

The productions on display cross installation, analog and digital photography, found object and sculpture, mediums that the artist uses as instruments of speculation and reification. The works suggest a direct relationship between extraction on the level of the artistic process, both material and of value, and on a more analytical level, interrogating criticalities related to the present time, particularly the relationship with technology, yet from a personal, emotionally invested perspective. An element made explicit by the exhibition environment itself, marked by a few light points and treated in dark tones, evoking the entrance to a remote place: an intimate space – whether psychic or oneiric – but also a rocky gorge or an underground warehouse.

The Sleeper (life-size)
is a 1:1 scale photographic portrait of the artist’s partner caught sleeping in their bed. The exposure of an already intimate and vulnerable moment enters into a suggestive relationship with an additional form of invasiveness. The photograph indeed conceals a second portrait in the form of a data report, The Sleep, created through a biomedical device – the sensor-equipped bodysuit that is partially revealed in the photo – through which the artist recorded the parameters of her partner’s breathing, heartbeat, and body movements during a night’s sleep. By treasuring an act of appropriation of sensitive data, the photograph seems to take on a virtual three-dimensionality, traversing portraiture from the view camera to biometrics, re-proposing the theme of the machinic image as a capture of the soul.

The confrontation with the logic of the machine is a recurring perspective in Paolo Bufalini’s work, which is filtered in beloved by dynamics of feeling and memory, both personal and datafied. The image of the ‘beloved one’ returns in the refrigerator unit filled with cans of energy drinks, on which is printed a childhood photograph of her in a carnival mask. Tricksters takes the form of a monolithic lightbox that holds at low temperatures the viral multiplication of  this crowd of harlequins, emitting a carnal light into the environment. If The Sleeper refers back to the world of data collection, the ergonomic invasion of devices, and the existence of sensitive information circulating outside the horizon of perception, Tricksters seems to call into question the purposes that the same collection of sensitive data has: to the profiling and fragmentation into categories of the subject, its transformation into a reservoir of expendable value follows. The refrigerator thus becomes a hyper-personalized advertising display to enhance one’s performance to a taurine caricature of the self.

The last work in the exhibition is the sculptural group Untitled, a composition of forty-five multiform tins, presented on the wall in the form of a diptych. The work originates from a childhood memory of the artist, a ritual of molybdomancy – the divination of the shapes assumed by molten metal thrown into cold water – that has become a New Year’s tradition in various northern European countries. A family game to be played with children, as in the artist’s memory. The theme of divination, of questioning the future, associated with the promises of technology, also returns frequently in Paolo Bufalini’s production. Several works feature the crystal ball, which the artist conceives as the medieval version of an interactive screen, a possible icon of a time when techno-futuristic and seemingly rationalist narratives conceal a strong component of magical
and mystical thinking, from entrepreneur gurus to predictive algorithms. While tin may evoke a more material image of excavation, it is also one of the most widely used metals for soldering electronic components. Similarly to the sphere, the choice of the diptych seems to echo a medieval motif, the ancient illustrated layout, inviting the viewer to study a kind of codex or encyclopedia of mineralogical prophecies.

The tin concretions – random forms generated by the hot-cold clash evoked throughout the whole exhibition – recall a figure of becoming, seemingly contrary to the mathematical clarity of computer code. Yet the invitation to a practice of reading by an association of images, in which the phenomenon of pareidolia – the recognition of known patterns from random shapes, as in the reading of clouds – takes place, also refers back to computer vision, to artificial intelligence software such as Google Deep Dream and Dall-E.

From the photograph that captures a part of the soul as a kind of Horcrux, to the cold room that contains the reproductive power of a meme, up to the metalized viscera interrogated by a priest- algorithm, the space of Gelateria Sogni di Ghiaccio is turned into a camera obscura, where at the extraction of the profound is discovered to be fixed a technical internalization of the world.

Condylura

beloved
has been realized thanks to the support of:
Settori Musei Civici Bologna I MAMbo - Ixart - OmniArtVerse - FAB Foundation
and in collaboration with: Treti Galaxie e Ass. BOCA

Graphic design: Studio Visivo (Marco Casella, Mattia Pajè)

Press:

Segnonline
ATP Diary
Exibart (interview)

Pictures:

1-3 exhibition views
4-7 The Sleeper (life-size), 2022, inkjet print on baryta paper Canson II 103,5x130x4,5cm
8-11 Tricksters, 2023, refrigerator, 239 customized energy drink cans, 196x120x70cm
12-15 Untitled, 2023, tin, 110x100x7cm
16 Graphic design

Ph: Manuel Montesano


Mail, 2020-2022 (series)
snake skin, iron, 45x31x2,5cm

The work consists of a metal frame in the form of an e-mail icon, lined with snakeskin. The snake is for me one of the most tangible evocations of the alien as a threat, and more broadly an element whose symbolic significance interests me - from biblical tradition to mythology and the eternal return. Mail is a message formalized not as verbal content, but as a mere perception of threat, at once indefinite and fatal.

Exhibitions:

2022 emERgenze contempoRanEE (permanent), Museo della Città, Rimini, curated by Cristina Ambrosini, Claudia Collina, Giovanni Sassu
2020 Futuro. Arte e società dagli anni Sessanta a domani, Gallerie d’Italia, Vicenza, curated by Luca Beatrice and Walter Guadagnini

Pictures:

1-3 Mail (I), 2020
4-6 Mail (II), 2021, installation view at MAMbo, Nuovo Forno del Pane
7-9 Mail (III), 2022

Ph: Filippo Cecconi, Manuel Montesano


Untitled, 2019
snake taxidermy, hat, 120x20x25cm

Ph: Manuel Montesano

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Untitled, 2019
camail, alligator paw, 45x20x10cm

Exhibitions:

Snoozin’ Gutssss
, Neverneverland, Amsterdam, curated by MRZB

Ph: Filippo Cecconi

Paolo Bufalini artista artist art arte


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Untitled, 2018
chainmail, glass sphere, 100x40x15cm

A glass sphere rests on a sort of ventral sac, obtained from a chainmail. I see the latter as a phantom, a casing emptied of the body, that carries a predictive tool. The glass sphere is a potentially all-encompassing, transparent, and at the same time cryptic container. Shining with reflected light, it refers to a lunar type of knowledge, i.e.based on irrational intuition rather than on the dissection of words and concepts. The work can be read as an evocation of magical thinking, of its persistence in contemporary narratives. The topos of clairvoyance, in fact, today returns in the form of hyper-advanced technologies, such as the predictive algorithms used in Data analysis.

Exhibitions:

2019 Homo Sapiens, DAS, Bologna, curated by Davide Da Pieve
2019 Ducato Prize finalists exhibition, Palazzo del Podestà, Castell’Arquato (PC)
2018 Communal Leakings, Macao, Milano, curated by MRZB

Pictures:

1-3 installation views at Communal Leakings, 2018, Macao, Milano, curated by MRZB
4-6  installation views at Homo Sapiens, 2019, DAS, Bologna, curated by Davide Da Pieve

Ph: Roberto Casti, Filippo Cecconi, Manuel Montesano

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Untitled, 2018
puzzle, human skull fragments, 50x30x12cm

Exhibitions:

2018 Bello (duo w/ Daniele Pulze), Dimora Artica, Milano
2018 Low (solo), Adiacenze, Bologna

Press:

Phroom

Pictures:

1-3 installation views at Bello, 2018, Dimora Artica
4-5 installation views at  Low, 2018, Adiacenze, Bologna


Ph: Filippo Cecconi

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