FIORANO.- Mutina for Art presents a new project for the series Dialogue, dedicated to ceramics experimental productions of contemporary artists.

The great site-specific installation Passaggio della Vittoria by artist Paul Thorel, commissioned by Madre Museum in Naples, opened on 22 June 2018.

It is a large-scale mosaic of about 180 square meters made with 1,832,400 tiles, each one square centimeter, and decorated with digital machines, laid on the four walls of the passage that connects the central courtyard of the museum to the sculpture courtyard.

Passaggio della Vittoria dissolves a combination of shapes and colors through a special process of image decomposition, typical of Thorel’s work. The installation, commissioned by Museo Madre, quotes natural elements, typical Neapolitan architectural references and physical and mental landscapes suggestions.

This monumental wall installation combines the traditional technique of mosaic with the language of pixels and technology, creating an evocative and strongly contemporary experience.

A set of shapes, segments, horizons and colors accompanies the visitor in the passage from one point to another during the visit. The transit from digital decomposition to the real recomposition of the gaze and “the passage” from the absence of vision to intuition, are the interpretative elements manifested in their most emblematic meaning, and constitute the most complete work created by the artist to date.

Passaggio della Vittoria is the result of a special collaboration between artist, museum and company, a dialogue that has made possible the creation of a new permanent installation in one of the most important Italian museum Institutions.

As the leading company in the field of ceramics, which has always been linked to the world of contemporary art, Mutina has chosen to accompany Paul Thorel’s research about the perception of the image offering its special skills in the ceramic processing and production, by using an innovative double-inking digital print with gloss finish on mosaic.

“The oblique look is a look that escapes and that leads you to put yourself at the side of things so as to lose that lucidity that would give no room to chance. Not being too lucid, losing concentration, perceiving rather than looking, giving way to apparitions, are among the elements of my research and are an integral part of my work, tools on a par with the camera and the computer”. Paul Thorel

“Mutina continues to experiment and inform, this time with Paul Thorel and the AMDRE Museum. It is a great honour to produce this permanent artwork, a special collaboration, as per our tradition. An initiative dedicated to art and to work of an extraordinary artist such as Paul Thorel”. Massimo Orsini, CEO Mutina

After visiting the studio of the artist Carla Accardi in Rome in 1974, and devoting himself to pictorial research, Paul Thorel (London, 1956) began to explore the creation of digital images at the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel in Paris in 1979. In the following years, he also dedicated himself to experimental projects, collaborating with TV production centres, computer industries and universities, realising projects for cinema, theatre and advertising. The accidental distortions of the image and the so-called “snow effect”, produced by meteorological turbulences that cause the disrupted reception of the audiovisual signal on the television screen and require the adjustment of the television antenna, contributed to define a mobile and immersive gaze. An attraction towards the alteration of the image at the beginning of the eighties led Thorel to be one of the first European artists to explore digital technologies in the photographic practice, applying himself to the digital treatment of the image, to its decomposition into lines, shadows and indistinct traits. Since 1982, Thorel has published the results of his ongoing research in international photography magazines such as Aperture, Originale, Zoom and Photographies Magazine, as well as in various Italian newspapers and weeklies. Starting from a real image, the artist breaks down the recognisable image into horizontal, lateral and oblique lines, creating a rarefied and indefinite landscape. Only a ‘distant’ and visionary gaze, at odds with the hyper-realism of the photographic medium, can recompose the image, recognising in a succession of vibrating shading effects, real human figures, faces, immersed within their contexts. These include portraits, such as those presented in exhibitions at the Castello Svevo in Bari (2002), the MANN-Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples (2003) and the Institut Français de Florence in Florence (2009).