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‘Eyes Closed’: Nunzio Paci Dissects Humanity and Nature’s Relationship
Eyes Closed, the newest exhibit at Galerie Stephanie, finds the balance between realism and fantasy in the paintings featured. Italian artist Nunzio Paci revels in capturing the middle ground of life and death, creating something both haunting and calming in the process.
Paci works with the idea of portraying life as dreamlike and intangible. It evokes a togetherness with our surroundings, merging humanity and nature when much of our history attempts to overcome it.
“This series of works portrays women in states of slumber and meditation,” the exhibit write-up said. “This atmosphere of vulnerability creates a paradoxical catharsis where the abundant flowers personify an articulated wilderness.”
Nature and the Human Body
Paci’s paintings in Eyes Closed depict a version of humanity that’s tied directly to nature. The portraits of sleeping women become transparent like in a medical textbook. But instead of showing internal organs, blood vessels, and bones, it instead shows fruits and flowers and root systems entangled where those vessels and bones exist.
These works emphasize the similarity of plants and their root systems with humanity’s own internal systems. The stem of a plant supplants the backbone effortlessly, and its own branches work as blood vessels and nerves well.
Imprints of flowers exist within the skin of the female models, and flowers seem to bloom in their hair. In some of the portraits, the flower petals expand to become clothing, covering different parts of the arms and torso.
The environment and atmosphere for the works are intentionally dreamlike. Eyes Closed depicts the subjects with their eyes closed because it wants to transport viewers to a world where the surreal co-exists together with our own reality. There, the connection between nature and humanity becomes less tenuous and more easy to link.
“Paci’s dreamlike exhibition untangles the intangible and ever-intriguing dialogues between humans and nature,” the write-up said. “[It involves] the states of the subconscious as a vital element of what it means to fully be absorbed and rooted into one’s surroundings.”
Portraying the World as One
Despite these links, many people still see our humanity as separate from our surroundings. They draw lines and borders between where humanity and nature lives. Nunzio Paci, however, merges these two into a singular whole in his works. He uses these elements together to build towards a broader dissection of how we use art to portray the world around us.
The end result incorporates these fantastical imagery to what amounts to medical sketches and illustrations. These stylistic choices, his website wrote, attempt to reduce the “distance between artifice and naturalism” in art.
“His faithful reading of tangible data, through the use of a surreal and poetic language, offers a glimpse into alternative scenarios and impossible perspectives,” a statement from his website said.
Eyes Closed represents nature as a vital part of our own humanity. Its surrealist imagery allows one to ponder these links, and how parts of ourselves are intrinsically important to our surroundings. We are shaped by the world around us, and Nunzio Paci portrays that with openness.
The exhibit is open to view in Galerie Stephanie until September 27.
Related reading: Galerie Stephanie Debuts Two New Exhibits on Nature and City Life
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