P a o l o P o r e l l i
"Divenire: tra materia, storia e natura. Zeitgenössische Keramik aus Italien"
11 July – 30 September 2026
Stadtmuseum Siegburg, Siegburg, Germany
In this exhibition, the Italian ceramic artists Paolo Porelli and Mattia Vernocchi present two forms of expression with distinct artistic connotations that bridge the conceptual gap between figuration and abstraction.
Paolo Porelli (1966) originally comes from a background in painting. Through his explorations of art history, he has internalised the European canon and has focused primarily on the depiction of figures from ancient mythology and Christian iconography. He devoted himself to the medium of ceramics at a very early stage, using it to explore the topoi of the figure in art and thereby developing his own personal style, which he has refined over many years. Paolo Porelli creates archetypal figures, starting from an original stereotype which he transforms into a multitude of new subjects of an alienated, metaphysical nature. Thus, a 5th-century statue of Minerva – goddess of wisdom, war and craftsmanship – served as the starting point for a series of female figures who are recognisable as such, yet at the same time abstracted and transformed through free formal inventions. They embody rational thought, but also strength, violence and madness. In their symbiotic hybrid form, they remain alien and mysterious, present yet mythically ethereal. Another group of figures is based on the Sibyl, the ancient Roman seer and prophetess. Here too, Porelli transforms the classical, archaic figure into something enigmatic and ambiguous by veiling faces, heads and torsos with flowing hoods and placing surreal attributes in their hands instead of the traditional book. The multitude of small orange Protestant Madonnas contrasts with the uniqueness of the Virgin Mary; they seek connections between rigid religious concepts and open up the physicality of the image to a transformative dialectic that transcends its aesthetics.
Both artists draw on a personal reflection on industrial society, excessive consumption, alienation and the loss of nature, which they use as a creative pretext to produce works that lead back to humanity’s archaic roots and to a necessary reunification with nature and our fellow human beings.
In the exhibition at the Stadtmuseum Siegburg, their works meet in person for the first time and meaningfully complement one another to form a ceramic discourse on the roots of our being and becoming.
Dr Gundula Caspary
Stadtmuseum Siegburg
Becoming: between material, history and nature
Becoming is an ongoing transformation whose contours elude us, to quote Cézanne. It is the very idea of the future, which is nebulous by definition and takes shape in relation to the choices we make as we go along, both in our private lives and amidst major historical upheavals.
It is an open-ended situation in which anything can happen, for better or for worse, leaving us in suspense since we lack the prophetic ability to foresee the future that oracles or sibyls possess. Nevertheless, the present helps us to establish the conditions, the premises, for viewing the future in either a more serene or disquieting manner, and to tell the truth, the outlook today is not a pretty one. But a historical perspective can help us better face the present, with the awareness that, as Mao said, the world is a construction site of dust and blood.
From the post-war period onwards, we believed that a fairer world was possible, but nothing lasts forever, and brute forces lie in wait, cyclically poised to reassert their dominance; we must therefore fight once more to reclaim our lost rights. Such is the ebb and flow of history. For the artistic process, material is the primary focus, just as it is for the dynamics of power, driven by the possession of resources for materialistic supremacy.
Material is the medium that gives us the possibility to express ourselves physically; it is an indispensable mass that we can transform into poetry or industrial production. It is the conduit through which we come to know the world, with which we build our knowledge and shape our vision of the reality of which we are a part and to whose transformation we wish to contribute.
It is a creative ‘furor’, an engagement that levitates images and forms in a game that draws us into a physical struggle, mysteriously bringing to light forms that did not exist before. It is the pulsating core of creation, which we as artists have the privilege of acting upon as well as paying the price for.
We become the intermediaries of a chain of physical and intellectual reactions made up of reflections, doubts, solutions and failures that ultimately materialise into creations that amaze us to such an extent that we wish, with every new work, to relive that extraordinary sensation of wonder. In our own small way, we also try to convey a sense of the world—however vast and infinite it may be—by seeking to grasp its dynamics and by creating models, distilling a vision that is uplifting and, in some way, worthy of sharing.
However, the images we produce arise within an historical and cultural context that contributes to their genesis. As children of our time, we are influenced by the phenomena underpinning our civilisation. We have left traces of this in our work through the diversity of styles that characterises us. Reflections of consumer society in the form of industrial waste, combined with materials and symbols of the nihilistic mindset of technology and the economy, are present in the works of both artists. Thus, we both begin with a ruthless analysis of the problems of consumer society and the devastating repercussions on nature caused by humankind, which has shifted from using nature sustainably to exploiting it. Thus, as a reaction to this degeneration, our work as Italian artists has matured. Echoing the motto of the great German artist Beuys, ‘art in defence of nature’, they have given impetus to a revitalising body of work in support of nature that can chart a positive course towards the regeneration of human perspectives. Inspired by creations originating in the way nature operates and transforms itself in a continuous evolution of form and material, hybrid simulacra, symbioses between man and nature are created, which are sublimated in the green colour of plant sap.
History, too, as a succession of events that have brought about an evolution or a revolution in thought, is an ongoing and indispensable factor that we can dip into, a human experience that connects us to the past and enables us to live a more conscious present.
At the same time, art history, as the visual language of the ages, is our preferred and inexhaustible source of inspiration, not only for styles or techniques but above all for the conceptual implications that artists have touched upon within the kaleidoscope of human psychology, exemplified in myth and in the common denominator of the collective unconscious. From this melting pot emerges the unpredictable result of the works of both of us. This essay is a brief attempt to provide an idea, even approximative, to you, the viewer, so that for when you stand before the actual works, perhaps only then will you have a deeper sense of them, when the power of the expressive material manifests itself before you and magically transforms you into ‘beings in the process of ‘becoming, between material, history and nature’.
Paolo Porelli
