Elia Gasparolo – Fragmented Memory

“Alice: How long is it forever?

Mr. Rabbit: Sometimes just a second. ”

Lewis Carroll, Alice´s Adventures in Wonderland, (1865)
Strokes, pieces, segments, parts, fractions, fragments. Life is built from a sum of moments, from episodes that are linked and justify their existence in the existence of those who succeed them, at the exact point where they give way the time to come when theirs has ended. Life, us, things, everything seems to be a handful of clippings more or less well organized to enable comprehensible readings of the immeasurable. However, eternity is manifested in each one of them forever, leaving a register of our passage; art is the materialization and evidence of our ephemeral existence.

Elia Gasparolo does a type of work that is permanently debated between the vehement imposition of the desire for permanence and the inevitable fragility of that utopian reality. Her series have names that make one think of introspective scenarios where the viewer can´t escape reflection even when it is presented in a subtle and unconscious way. The Right To Memory (2017), The Lovers (2018-19), What makes your heart beat? (2019), are some of the titles of her series which invite us to answer questions that interrogate us. Memory, love, heartbeats, aren´t them all fragments of realities condensed into specific memories? No one remembers everything, no one can or they would lose their mind. We are owners of a selective memory that in Elia’s work is embodied among graphics that intertwine as if sewing stitched together the thoughts. Chinese inks run on rice paper, other times collage creates absolutely abstract universes where matter is superimposed integrating differentiated layers, dense glazes. Because everything isn´t the same, because it is this right to memory that forces us to organize, to hierarchize in some way that fragile and wrinkled space that supports the lines. Other times, the artist uses paradise wood and laurel to create screens, objects bearing an outstanding oriental elegance.

And the oriental imprint is also projected in the series where those lovers are lost in symbiotic passions, where the line is no longer so clearly distinguished, where the monochrome appears with all authority, only enabling circumstantially, some echo of the individual personalities of those bodies that the artist portrays at the exact moment where they are one. It´s the organic brushstroke, the circularity, the enveloping of these dancing scenes, aquatics, that moves on rice paper between inks and acrylics. But also the figuration is present in the form of graphite, in small pieces where the plastic resources synthesis is absolute, where the color submits to the line and where the question becomes evident; these are the hearts that the artist draw, those that only have questions to ask themselves and ask ourselves.

Elia Gasparolo’s work moves from the plane to the space and vice versa, being interested in actions and performance as much as in photography, drawing, painting, objects and bio-art. In this sense, it is interested the experience carried out in Glimpses of Nature (Destellos de la Naturaleza, 2018) with the artist Joaquín Fargas in the context of a residence in the province of Catamarca, Argentina. The dialogue with the environment, the installation as a plastic choice to confront the natural universe with robotics, strengthens the foundations for future work in this tuning, testing the limits that separate and relate man to his habitat and technology.

Elia thinks in terms of the ungraspable, of the fleetingness of the whole. Her works seek to highlight links but always emphasizing the fragments as individualities that unite, where each union, each relationship, is eventual. In this search, her latest works go through life cycles: the “biocycles” of organic matter transformed into skins. Dry spots, fruit pulps, peels and debris are regenerated in vegetable skins, memento mori if any. Because the artist creates biodegradable textiles condemned not to last, works that I like to think of as that skin that we inhabit and that puts us in relation to the other as a great wall from where the exteriority and interiority of the being is defined. We are all that, even though many times we may think that we are nothing. We are that accumulation of fragmented memory that sustains our coherence, we are multiplicity of passions, reflections, experiences, ideas, loves, anguishes, successes, frustrations and so much more. Elia Gasparolo’s work gives us her particular reading about a journey that we seem to pretend to catch and it permanently escapes us in its evolution.

Perhaps Mr. Rabbit is right and in that single second, eternity is summed up. And any wise man would know how to find there, peace and the meaning of existence. Perhaps art is the latch through which Mr. Rabbit sneaks, taking with him his insight and intelligence; maybe it’s a matter of following him … who knows what wonders we can find.

Lic. María Carolina Baulo, June 2020