Flo
—overview—
'The embrace'
Exhibition curated by Laila Calantzopoulos
July 2023
In the last few years my work has been oriented towards research on the relationship between the body and painting. The series ¨The embrace¨ stems from an injury: a shoulder injury prevented me from performing habitual movements that, so ordinary, are lost in oblivion. Faced with the impossibility of painting, I could only look inwards. I traveled to the confines of my territory to confirm what I already felt: painting is the body and the body is painting.
Since then, the individual organism and the social organism have tuned in to a common process: configuring a different way to pass the days. Painting saved me. The desire to reconnect with her helped me to trust and to move on. Though not without discipline, as curing a body and painting both require patience. With each treatment, my fragmentary anatomy followed the path towards unity. Work after work, I rediscovered the coming and going of my entrails towards the canvas and from the color to the flesh. A force began to spread from my core towards the shoulder blades, which spread like wings. The entire body began to move avidly and to expand towards the collective, to transcend from its own towards the universal, and return on the same path.
The set of works that make up this series oscillates between the charm of the sinister and the return of a past that abandons familiar logic and seeks new questions for an ambiguous present. It is an invitation to halt in another kind of passing. Inhabit the oil’s tempo to find sediments of multiple art histories among the glazes. Fragments that look straight at whoever observes them, to reveal unknown wisdom. Wisdom which evokes memory of our true power.
Today, I am ready to embrace again. With my visceral body and with my body that, because of being pictorial, is no less vehement.
— Exhibition —
The embrace, July—Sep 2023. Botschaft der Argentinischen Republik, Berlin.
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The embrace II.
Atelier Gallery / Alexine Good,
Berlín, Germany
'El Caldero'
Exhibition text by Lula Mari
May 2021
A body of colour moves between green and red, oscillating between areas of light and shadow. The hues melt, separate, draw a dimension and return to the mist, which is as much air as it is water.
There is something brewing in Flo Giovanni Pacini's paintings.
The surface of the canvas hollows out to become a vessel that not only contains textures and atmospheres, but also intuitions, mythologies, a pinch of astrology, dreams, nightmares, experiences, the body of a woman who knows she is one and many, the desire to house herself and others.
El caldero (the cauldron) is utilized in festivities to cook sacrificial offerings. It is also the device used by witches to cook their brews. The fire burns beneath el caldero. The food prepared there is more like a potion than a delicacy. It nourishes, yes, but above all, it heals. Cats know this.
A painting that paints the act of painting, and a painting that is experienced as an act of magic.
Perhaps that is why the eyes and hands stand out, going from the painter to the painting as if it were a mirror. Something is grazed before disappearing: some indistinguishable consistency, an intensity.
The painting throbs and summons us to the ritual. It awaits us with its ancient promise renewed.
— Exhibition —
El Caldero, May—Sep 2021. El Más Acá, Cultural Club
Review Martín Palottini
bio
Buenos Aires, 1988. I am a graduate of Image and Sound Design at the University of Buenos Aires. I studied drawing and painting in the ateliers of Lula Mari and Martín Palottini. I took live model, drawing and painting lessons at the Grand Central Academy (New York) and specialized in the oil technique at the Florence Academy of Art (Firenze) and the Fine Arts Academy (Köln).
I participated in various salons. At the Young Salon of the Eduardo Sívori Museum of Plastic Arts I won the 1st prize (2015). At the Divina proportion de Teorema contest (2016) I won the 3rd prize with an exhibition at the Quinquela Martín Museum. That same year I was invited to be part of the book "Best Latin American Illustrators 2015" from the University of Palermo. In 2017 I was selected for the official competition of the 1st Expanded Corporality International Festival. I obtained the 1st prize to exhibit in Buenos Aires Directo de Artista (BADA, 2019), at La Sociedad Rural Argentina. In 2020 I was chosen to participate in Flame Zine, an emerging transfeminist art magazine from Berlin, Germany, and I won a scholarship to exhibit at El más acá Cultural Club. During 2022 I participated in the Art Basel Miami fair: Virtual Reality with Sublimart NFT, and in the WO foundation virtual women's group show "Disrupted", curated by Sergio Gomez.
I participated in multiple individual and collective exhibitions in galleries, museums and cultural spaces such as Casa Bastet, lmaginario Galería - Gallery nights, La Oreja Negra, Gestural Graphic Gallery, Eduardo Sívori Museum of Plastic Arts, C. C. Ernesto Sábato, La Fragua Gallery, Library of Congress de la Nación, Casa Dasein, CHELA, Galería Besares, and El más acá Cultural Club, where I had two individual exhibitions. I recently had a solo exhibition held at the Argentine embassy in Berlin in July of this year.
I live in Bunos Aires and New York.
Interviews, notes and reviews:
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LA LA LISTA. A list of local artists you should know (2021) (EN)
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Conversation with Lula Mari for El Más acá Club (2020) (ESP)
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Brushstrokes and other condiments by Stella Sidi in Conexión abierta Radio (2019)
Work description
For most of recorded history, women’s private lives have received little respect. How many accomplished actresses and musicians have had interviews about their work reduced to gossip about their romantic life? How many mothers have had their own need for privacy ignored or resented by their families? When female authors write about their lives and relationships it is considered “Chick Lit,” while when men do the same it is considered canon. So perhaps it is jarring here, in de Giovanni Pacini’s work, to see the female psyche spotlit, the outlandish reverie not dismissed but instead relished and slowly savored as the main event.
After all, where are we more free than in our subconscious? Free not to just do but to feel, to examine our true selves via impossible mirrors. Our carnal impulses are revealed, our deepest shames unearthed. We too can be voyeurs, peering under a leafy frond at a nude man bathing. We too can tear at the fish with our teeth. We peer at our reflections through crashing waves, we have cats and birds and pangolins as familiars. We muse over sacred texts, we cast incantations. We die and are reborn and die again. We are not reduced to fantasy but instead the fantasy made real.
Whether spiralling or saturated, De Giovanni Pacini’s compositions invite you to follow the painting into an inner, deep, uterine dimension where the magic of the feminine is distinctly animalistic. Thoughtful or overwhelmed, lustful or despairing, every woman in her paintings holds open a door to the collective female spirit. Her work asks the viewer to consider: what dreams have they awoken from? And which are they still dreaming?