Ascension

What we name “man” is perhaps not to be dissociated from the sign of his fall and desires of ascension. Desires to correct the essential deviation, to recuperate the lost origin, or just soar towards the celestial spheres in order to, who knows, touch the mysteries of the universe and the gods. To transcend, even for a moment, our miserable and erratic existence about this heavenly body: wasn’t this one of the promises of the art?

Anna Paola Protasio is a graduate architect and, in this exhibition, her relationship with the constructive tradition of the art becomes transparent. The artist makes use of construction stepladders as a poetic metaphor of the elevations: ladders which, superposed in frail equilibrium, build interrupted bridges trying to reach the celestial abode.

Transparent and fragile stepladders which seem to reach solar rays or to dangle from them. Untouchable ladders, because of nails or covered and sealed. Ladders which, attracted to a nucleus, suggest the building of a world or dilating it in explosions and vectors. Ladders which end up by betraying their original function: to move towards the heights. Finally, they are impossible ladders, they portray impossible ascensions. Every ascension is only a desire. The culmination of its ideal was always suspended in endless reconstructions, in unfinished ladders and bridges. Art is not the moment of transcendence, cry Anna Paola ladders. On the contrary, it is fed on the perplexities and vertigo of the falls, on the unsolved mysteries of the universe, on the errs that made man search, unsuccessfully, for his face mirrored on the stars.