Emanuela Campolii - Paris

Emanuela Campoli is pleased to announce The Pulverized Poem, Nick Mauss’ fifth exhibition with the gallery and his first in Milan. For his exhibition at 48, Foro Bonaparte, Nick Mauss juxtaposes two mirrored murals and a drawing on paper and voile in an apartment that appears suspended in a state of ambiguous habitation -- not yet, or no longer, lived in or vacated. Painting behind glass, Mauss enacts procedures of painting in reverse. Line and color, applied in layers on the verso of the transparent support, produce a meshwork of simultaneous description, figuring fragments of bodies in a gestural vocabulary that shuttles between written language, obliteration, and ornamental cipher. Through a process of silvering, the painted glass is rendered reflective, animated by alchemical swarms of silver deposits and halos of oxidization behind the brushmarks. Corresponding and reacting to the given architecture of the space, and bodies that move in it, these works simultaneously invoke decorative interior schemes, early photographic processes, and the psychological function of mirrors in Baroque paintings and noir cinema. But the fraught implication of decorative painting here also functions as a vandalization of the field of vision, as the viewer finds herself implicated in the collapsed space of these painted mirrors, registering a cross-hatching of gazes. In addition to the mirrored murals, the exhibition includes a paratactic drawing composed of multiple conterminous sheets, seen through a length of voile. Marked with a grid that echoes the sheets of glass, the transparent fabric overlay suggests another interference, or delay, of vision, as much as a sense of fragility and dissolution. "To read this poem," Maurice Blanchot wrote of René Char’s collection The Pulverized Poem , "is to accept....the experience of a certain breaking up, an experience of separation and discontinuity."