Paola Volpato is an artist engaged for years in cultural actions that are related to the field of gender policies and denunciation of violence against women and nature. She works in the field of visual arts and poetry with the means of painting,video and installation. To her credit numerous exhibitions and collaborations with public institutions.

When you start with a new artwork have you already developed the project?
I generally work on selected issues – a process I started after the Academy, while I produced my first work Otello in 1986. I usually spend some months searching for images that may belong to me among thousands of pictures, studying the work of other artists. Little by little I begin to shape the composition. I put in dialogue necessary images recomposing fragments of real world visions. Sometimes considered as oppositional or conflicting viewpoints, all conveys a certain irony and a genuine curiosity. My works are always first projected and then painted.

So, your work is slow and weighted…
I prefer geometric mosaics, plants, patterns, faces: if I draw live I like volumes and shadows. I like starting from images that attracts me. One calls others and immediately opens new gates. Gates about style, colors, space and meanings and the result is the creation of labyrinths from where is difficult to escape. I tend to discover more than be affirmed and I prefer divergence more than closure, to observe opposites more than be rhetorical. I have an instinctive visual input to outside world that makes me research on shapes able to explain it, in fact they create it from the awareness that our knowledge about it is limited and that is necessary to explore and investigate on it. I see the multiformity of things and my game is to select and connect them to a more advanced temporary and dialogic system. But this is done by doing, it builds itself with the power that each image has and the links it launches to other images, spaces and colors. So to answer the question: my work can be defined slow but instinctive, weighted but unpremeditated.

You recently produced some videos. I’m referring to the detail of Fire Games presented at Villa Da Porto in Montorso Vicentino and to Femicide 2015-2019 set up for the Civic Museum of Chioggia. How do you judge this experience?
Video is a flexible and interesting medium and it allows me to express myself in a complexity of plans. I enjoyed working on the soundtrack and on the possibility to act simultaneously on multiple dialoguing videos. For example the video installation Femminicidio, topic I have been working on for several years, made the artwork more addictive: drawing, music, projections permeate entirely the environment and allow an immersive space, an involving and sensory experience.

Your latest works deal with themes such as nature and genre. Do you feel a social artist?
The artwork manifests and composes itself – in a certain sense the aesthetics finds its pieces and perfect balances in a modest way. Nor can the work become didactic or political in a declamatory sense. On the other hand, stereotypes, complacent art and also vulgarity that means carelessness and superficiality, irritate me. I believe that beauty is in truth and that artists have a true mission and the potential to accomplish it. I could say that I learn through aesthetics. The tree is an example: the branches branching out from the trunk always more articulated and expanded. It is mesmerising because it contains the perfection of representation of knowledge itself – which spreads, expands. Truth cannot disregard primary elements of life and beauty, and art –which is our attempt to show it – responds to the categorical imperative to overturn all the relationships in which the living are degraded, enslaved, raped and killed. And this is political, starting with the feminine gender and with nature, that in this world pattern (scheme) are forced and oppressed and that’s why they could carry new visions.

Marco Mantovan
(Translated by Maria Francesca Frosi)

Info:

www.paolavolpato.it –  www.paolavolpato.com