In-Lusionem

On Romantic Fantasies

The form occupies the motion. A simple testament to what movement can bring to its shape, and how shape can in return compliment the exquisite definition of where everything begins: A woman. A woman is reflected off of a facade that repeats her presence in the room, not twice, but infinitely. An element, brought about by Patrizio Travagli, recreating a set into an incredible kinetic dimensionality. The clothes occupy multiple dimensions, and so does the environment holding the image of the woman motioning down this alternative space, allowing nothing but an illumination of presence to bring forward her pristine form. Is it one, or many?

Marco de Vincenzo is the author behind the masterpiece, and Travagli is that curious texture on display. The display room was Teatro Niccolini, which also provides a valid interpretation to what was being achieved in this recherché duo. The space was fashioned with square-plated light reflections on a vaulted ceiling, metallic leather seats, mirrors, and window displays that relive the 1970s all over again. This 500-year-old monument unoccupied for 20 years, houses a tremendous copulation of light with the impenetrable.

The linear work brought forward an elongation of the continual. A continual body, a continual neck, continual legs. Diversions of horizontal and vertical broke the body into fragments, and could only be revealed once again, into an alternative dimension of linearity. How compelling: An irrefutable presence of motion and form; form and motion. Colours drown the intensity of linearity, and obligate the floor and walls to adore the dress. The lack of drapery adds to its brilliance. Simplicity is the protagonist in questioning. A seemingly metallic set disguised as cement, or inversely-so, provokes the presence of a chain, heated by the moving form in the centre, immersed with a ripple of lines, and yes, without a doubt; Flatlandic Terrains. An element that will never leave Travagli’s patentability.

The multiplicity of what was being alluded to, prior to entering the halls of a magnificent space is found in the illusion shedding light on theory. In theory, the contemporary existence is replaced with the form in an alternative space. The temporal, anxious, immortal other: the one without care, history, and only conceived to be forgotten and reminded again. Therefore, the “illusion” is in the revelation, and the veracity is in that colour palette depicting what can only be out of sight. Tinkering with color spots and lines, its presence and lack-of brings back romantic fantasies, unbroken lines and whatever may divide them.

Wassily Kandinsky and Hilla Rebay, Point and Line to Plane. London: Dover Publications, 1979.

E.A. Abbott, Flatland. London: Eldritch Press, 1884.

This text is for the catalogue of the In-Lusionem exhibition held at Teatro Niccolini, Florence (Italy) in February 2016. A collaborative project between fashion designer Marco De Vincenzo and installation artist and painter Patrizio Travagli.