“You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.”

George Bernard Shaw

When your gaze is broken, interrupted, you begin to think.
Re-flection: it is from here that confusion and disarray are derived, the creation of images for a time of reflection.

Gilles Deleuze speaks of double images by nature in which the indiscernibility between past and present, reality and fantasy, true and false, is not created in the mind of the viewer, but it is a real objective characteristic of a specific type of image, an image containing duality, generating a new form of indiscernibility.

This is the case in Marco Paganini’s new series of art, a series of mirrors which, as under the spell of a fairy tale, place the viewer in a position of indiscernibility: a mirror that leaves the viewer with a simple virtuality and pushes him outside, beyond the looking glass.

The mirror is a surface that transfuses light and reflects the world, capturing the attention of the eye. The work of Paganini progresses slowly, depicting a non-linear evolution of time, each image depicting a different state of melancholy, or emptiness, through the claustrophobic use of mirrors: a meeting point – clash between the visible and non-visible, true or false, reality and fantasy.

Reaching the other side of the mirror. There is no more time to think, to see the immanence of all, a life in which everything repeats itself, similar and far away. The mirror thus becomes an alterating instrument that compresses esthetic moments of immense solitude, directionless, poetry, elegance, a mirror that helps overcome the deception of the perception that creates appearances. Images, spaces, objects from which reality cannot be distinguished from fiction to fantasy.

Le Gocce are a numeral system. Numbering means a set of rules to express and write numeric values. When numbers first made their appearance in different times and places, a system was required that would allow their use, vocally or in writing, through few words and a few basic signs. Each race devised its own numeral system, written and oral; throughout history many systems were devised, and eventually disappeared.

Even today, quite a few systems exist, but the most popular is the decimal system.

Marco Paganini organizes his materials like a score, and doesn’t follow the rules at the basis of the visual senses (point, of view, focus, etc…) he is forces to invent other ways in which to organize vision or sight. In his piece Le Gocce, numbers determine the articulation of the spacing. The numbers which appear, at times in the title, other times next to the image of a single drop, and mark the different sequences no longer determined by narrative groups but by color and numeral system. It is a numeral system that resembles dreams and fantasies which always try to explain the world, to label things. The numbering has strict limits and needs to abide to specific rules, but inserted in counting systems and the most unexpected of situations on tear drops, blood drops and unlikely classifications. Some examples demonstrate the artificiality, the arbitrariness, the playfulmess of counting systems. Even mathematics, as the organization of the uselessness and the insane, fails when up against tenderness, fear, and death itself. La Goccia can be transformed into an incomprehensible moment, different from the many ones that we believe we can control. The systems are destined to fail, and even numbers will be able to portray emotions.