Paolo Monti's Art at the Gallery auf der Empore
Cordial invitation to the opening Vernissage on 18 January 2001

The practice of art is an organised anomaly. It is disciplined in language. Other than this there is only chit-chat about “creativity”. The work of Paolo Monti has constantly revolved around this evidence and this awareness, through the filter (and code) of an instrumentation that ranges from the most prosaic manuability to the most sophisticated scientific-technological apparatus.  [...]  On one hand his work with money, and consequently the fetichism of Value: desire not of the object, but of desire itself. A vertigo of the most complete abstraction, of the most discarnate virtuality whilst at the same time representing the utmost factual operativity possible.
Massimo Carboni - Lecturer of aesthetics, Accademia delle Belle Arti, Florence

The psycho-physiological dimension of the way we look at things is constantly shifting, a fact that art records and reports. Paolo Monti does not evade this reality of art but deploys his sensibility and perception in the attempt to expand the boundaries of feeling and seeing. Right from the start, it has been Monti’s aim to shift the boundaries of perception between “visible” and “invisible”, to focus on some other dimension in order to discover, not solely his own humanity, but also his perceptual otherness.  This, fundamentally, is what science does, reaching beyond the confines of the human dimension, analysing everything, observing and appropriating the thing observed.

In his work, Monti musters the discoveries of recent natural science theory to go beyond mere representation in the direction of a dynamic interaction between observer and observed. An approach that imaginatively interweaves his reflections on the perceptual, psychological mechanisms brought into play by the work of art and on the relationships between aesthetics, science and technology.

Throughout his career, these themes have taken the form of room-sized installations in which the viewer is constantly incited to experiment in redrawing the boundaries of his own experience.

Partly through the use of technology, but more importantly, perhaps, with the aid of a particular “forma mentis”, Monti himself plunges, and plunges us, into the thing observed, allowing us to see, in “Flottage”, how the vibrations of sound, heat and electromagnetic waves, the radiations of light and energy are recorded waves, the radiations of light and energy are recorded and revealed in the form of changing colours that are evoked by reactions to heat or light, only to disappear once more.

Or allow us , as in “Dollar Image” to watch as capital is consumed, as over a period of time x , a banknote is attacked by light and heat-sensitive chemical reagents until it dissolves without trace, in a physiological demonstration of the transience of matter. “Time is money” we say. But here money is time. To the point of total entropy, to the point of final consumption, to the point of annihilation.

For all those reasons, Monti’s work cannot be described as technological, at least as we commonly understand that term because Monti could just as easily opt for some other representational possibility, should the opportunity arise, should he find elsewhere access to that Einfühlung or empathy with the world mentioned earlier.

For Monti, then, technology merely offers a pretext that allows him to explore a different conceptual approach that touches on the philosophical problems of subjective identity, but also considers the way we interpret reality and the world. A world of subtle interconnections in which we are all intimately related to one another and to the universe.

Hence, the real conditions of any observations, the interferences, the contrasts between theory and practice constitute Monti’s field of research, the aim of which is less to demonstrate the now self-evident nexi between art and science than to record and reveal a “fourth dimension” in which perception, imagination, thinking and feeling appear to coexist.

Selected writings on the Art of Paolo Monti

Exhibition Stills