Pietro Paolini


Exhibition

No Noise exhibition

Exhibition at Ego Gallery - Lugano, Switzerland 2011

View gallery

NoNoise, personal exhibition by Pietro Paolini, EGO Gallery - Lugano, Switzerland 2011

NoNoise is a collection of patches, a reflection on the urban space as a media to communicate.

No Noise exhibition

The city has always been a centre of communication. The urban space has become more and more filled with messages and in this contemporary era the possibility of communicating has increasingly become a commodity. By investing, in fact, one has the chance to use the space for conveying the desired messages. For this reason nowadays a gigantic advertising panel that hangs over the street is considered more than legal, while a lover’s graffiti on the walls of the city has become vandalism in the popular perception.

The public space, from once being a space for everyone has become a space for the few, specifically for those who are able to invest in this type of communication. And it is in this context that, since the seventies, the most active and widespread contemporary cultural movement has developed: street art. This language, which has by now evolved and become generally accepted and recognized as a form of artistic expression, brings with it a fundamental intrinsic value which is the direct reappropriation of the urban space as a forum for communication between people.

The NoNoise photographic series fits into this context. In today’s Florence the strong and justified tendency to preserve its artistic riches, translates into an attempt at total control of the urban aesthetic. This is why in recent years the fight against street art, graffiti and wall writing has intensified, notwithstanding the fact that Florence is not an Italian city that has been particularly affected by the phenomenon. The covering over of these works in the urban space follows the reasoning that they must be eliminated as fast as possible and not that the original state of the wall must be carefully restored.  The stains of colored paint that are superimposed and that fit together on the walls of the city are transformed in reality into a new mural work, into a new level of communication. In some pictures, the photographer becomes an active part of this silent urban battle. Interacting with the structures of commercial communication, where the great advertising panels invade the space, forming and modifying the common visual and cultural image, looking for a unusual silence in the urban landscape.

In this way photography becomes an instrument for the construction of a personal and lively imagination in the context of the visual war of the modern city. An instrument for the defense of one’s own imagination and expression.