Awareness of the Void: An Interview With Paola Schmidlin

“An ironic, inevitably dramatic conceptualization of human reality’s emptiness.”

 

Paola Fiorido: Your work in ten words?

Paola Schmidlin: An ironic, inevitably dramatic conceptualization of human reality’s emptiness.

PF: What is the sensation you wish to inspire in viewers of your work?

PS: The awareness of the void and the inescapable loneliness of being.

PF: What is your connection with the past? By whom are you inspired?

PS: With the past I have, I’d say, a sort of gut feeling, and my work is basically the fruit of a re-elaboration of visions, experiences, memories. For me, sculpture is almost a useless attempt to stop time, to spare a face, a body—even if it comes from my imagination or my unconscious—from the corruption of the flesh.

The past comes to the fore in my favorite subjects: old weather-beaten ladies, distressed by the end of the delusions of youth, or withered icons of Hollywood glamour that have become the mere shadows of themselves. Inspiration comes above all from anything but art: from a face I saw on a bus, a passage in a book, an old photo that speaks of forgotten lives… and of course a film with Joan Crawford or Gloria Swanson!

PF: Why did you decide to privilege sculpture in your practice? Is it because of the relationship between sculpture and space?

PS: Sculpture lets me give effectiveness or even a 3-D body to images that exist only in my mind and that thus become real. Sometimes it feels like magic… But I have never thought of any relation between my sculpture and the space. It’s not something I am interested in; it is alien to the type of work I do, which can be set in any sort of space and communicate something on its own. More than space, it is light that is important to me.