Francesco Pacelli at Rehearsal Project / Milan

Francesco Pacelli / Fishy Fishy Fishy X


4 October – 10 November


Rehearsal Project

Via G. Passerini 18
Milan, Italy

Photography by Cesare Lopopolo


Rehearsal Project presents Fishy fishy fishy X, a solo show by
Francesco Pacelli. Inspired by a scene from a famous movie by Monty Python, the
question introduced by the artist’s work considers the generative possibilities
of an imaginary made of elusive forms. Through sculptures, drawings and
installations, the exhibition induces the unknown. The X rejects the definition
and follows an enigma of works characterized by peculiar materials and refined
attentions, which live on constant tensions and hidden references, as if they
wanted to open a breach in the mystery of language. In a constant overlapping
of structures, materials, colors and images, the works become elements of a
single ecosystem that has all the taste of an unsolved fishy X.
“After crossing the bottom of
this pool of water that a very optimistic person would call a lake, a place of
harmonious tranquility suddenly appears, where no one is present. Consumed by
time and torn by a pitch-black light, this environment present ambivalent
scenarios that mix and blend together, fueling regrets and enthusiasms slowly
contaminating each other until overlapping, with hopes cyclically coming true
and then fading out in a continuous flow of alternating current. Shapes appear
vague in this fossilized, obscure silence, there’s no time for disorientation.
There is no place for boredom. There is only a blanket of ash covering ideas,
suffocating them up to strangle them, sketching what is underneath, like a
snow-covered soccer ball on a January morning. Here a lightning, a  bug, radon gas become equal and evanescent
pieces of a single entity in which borders are not perceived, in which
everything is flattened and the end of that branch coincides with the extension
of this little finger. Darkness and light are the same thing, without
interruption. The circle makes necessarily more sense than the half-line. The
elusiveness of these apparitions stimulates the reading parameters of a
phenomenology that is almost alienating, adding interpretative layers of a
reality that is basically impossible to dominate in an exhaustive way.
Sometimes you go on, you quite always get lost. In this fat and pasty slime,
orientation is delegated to other senses, to bats’ radar, to the air currents
that shape clouds, to the intuition of some blind fishes. You ambiguous
creature are able to reassure and shake us; however, the fear of change is
blocking my ability to clearly understand situations, immobilizing me. And that
stone, which I feel coming at great speed, will probably hurt me a lot. Wild
plants, you are not made to be contained by the tar, break it, free yourself,
take back what’s yours. A suffused glow can be glimpsed between two
anthracite-colored rocks, radially projecting faint and over-saturated images
of a changeable and uncertain future, undulating moods for which we will have
been unaware architects and nostalgic witnesses. This dirty sweatshirt is
burning, and the same is for the sea, for the sound of cotton, for the bother
caused by the wet sand between the feet and the flip-flops. It is one of the
many potential reality scenarios, or just a funny game for humans.”