PAOLA BABINI
Sedimentazioni liquide
From September 26 to October 3, 2026
The Exhibition
This artist explores numerous implications in producing works without the use of brushes, instead layering images, colors, and plastic supports. What holds them together is time. And, through her blends, Paola Babini speaks precisely of the nature of time. As Carlo Rovelli recalls, Einstein's discovery that "the idea that a well-defined now exists everywhere in the universe is therefore an illusion, an illegitimate extrapolation of our experience" was a momentous one. (...) The "present of the universe means nothing." At first glance, Babini's scenes appear immobile, as if nothing has happened, at least not in a chronological-horizontal sense. In truth, everything coexists in them, starting with what forms and then unfolds and resurfaces over time. We immerse ourselves in them and traverse internal paths, within an individual and collective unconscious. Furthermore, these superimpositions, which seem to recall past experiences while remaining fleeting, are always devoid of human beings, but not of human presence.
Babini herself says: "The allure of nature overwhelms me; fluid atmospheres merge in my mind, nourished by color and engaging my memory; the works become places where nature and history intertwine."
The Artist
Paola Babini lives and works in Ravenna. She studied painting with Umberto Folli at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ravenna. Since the late 1980s, she has exhibited in numerous solo and group shows. She is currently the director of the Academy of Fine Arts in Ravenna, with a term starting in 2023, and a tenured professor of Painting Techniques at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna.
She has long worked on memory, both personal and emotional, where her gaze, over the years, has gradually shifted from autobiographical investigation to an external perspective always filtered through a somewhat sentimental, firmly corporeal and organic experience. Her highly experimental materials, somewhere between the physical and the organic, are the subject of ongoing experimentation in which the physical and organic characteristics acquire a poetic status equal to the gesture. Thus, almost dreamlike sedimentations condense, constructing visions of meaning, both personal and collective, in which photography meets the pictorial gesture and material, cooling it through the stratification of films, papers, drawings, paint, and plexiglass. His language, however, is never minimalist, but proudly packed with references, corporeal, symbolic, historical, and metaphorical citations in which the everydayness of the gaze and narrative are transfigured and neutralized, tainted by earth, hands, gestures, and history. The use of plexiglass appears to be a fortunate choice; it is an aesthetically precious material in itself, enhancing chromatic refractions, multiplying them like a kaleidoscope, thus providing the works and boxes with a reflection that casts a colored shadow with fascinating effects of multiplication of light and image. An alternation dominated by full and empty, transparency of the material and coloring of the space. Artifice as a necessity of life in the choice of objects and in the formal aspect of representing them, thus giving rise to strange alchemies using mirrored surfaces or transparent boxes, always rich in color. As the artist states: "The charm of nature overwhelms me, fluid images merge in my mind." Atmospheres that feed on color and engage the memory"..
Paola Babini relies on a careful narration of the surrounding reality, captured through photography and mixed with our historical memories. As in a sort of collage of the soul, she reconstructs a past and superimposes it on the present, juxtaposing photographs of landscape elements with drawings of ancient architectural ruins and then trapping them together in transparent cases that act as a mnemonic reliquary and enclose the vision, freezing the moment in a process of liquefaction of the act. An invisible box that crystallizes the image given in order to preserve it over time, that irremediably fixes the suggestions and colors encountered by chance during her travels in the harmonious alternation of the seasons, the greens of the fields and the large trees that stand out in the countryside, the bright yellows of fallen leaves, the brightness of the water. Rare, liquid images, not exactly in focus and not completely finished, fragments of experience that move in transparency, between the mirrored frames, merging together. In an amalgamation that erases the idea of space and time and no longer allows for the distinction between memory and actual reality.
