Marina Paris

Critical text

Marina Paris (b. 1965, Sassoferrato) has always made drawings in black and white, using graphite pencils and India ink. After the impressions of an encounter with Alighiero Boetti at the end of the 1980s, when as a young student at the Academy of Fine Arts she visited the artist in his studio on Via del Pantheon in Rome, she would never forget the technique of tracing. Observing a work by Boetti, Copertine (1984), composed of tracings of the covers of many magazines, Paris understood that this technique can lead to another dimension. Utilizing the entire range of pencils, from the H specified for technical drawing to the 14B which is almost a charcoal, the artist has always made drawings, both to design installations and sculptures, and to create independent works on paper. Deploying tracing as a tribute to Boetti, the series Connecting Spaces (2018–2022) takes its cue from Paris’s ongoing interest in architecture biennials and in the relationship between human beings and space, always a central factor in her analysis. The thirteen original drawings presented in the Disegni section are taken from postcards, posters and photographs. During the years of the reconstruction, the postcards of the Italian post-war era paid tribute to shared public space as an aspect of democratic freedom.

Text by Irina Zucca Alessandrelli