Mirror Paintings / Entanglement Project

title: entanglement

cm. 280x300, oil and acrylic on three canvases, 2010

The research of the artist since two years is focused on the dilemma of the existing relationship between an original painting and its copy. His dare is the one to create an image and to translate it in an identical mirrored copy. The attempt to reproduce a primal icon is a challenge to recreate an aura that for definition is essential only to the original. His concern is the irreproducibility of the icon and his incapability to give birth to an identical image.
Harking back to quantum entanglement, a real unsolved mystery of physics, the couple of identical and mirror paintings, are< as equal and of opposite spin are the two particles entangled in the universe, being them linked even if distant thousands light years.

The mirrored images become also a metaphor of the intrinsic dualism of western culture and the portrayal of the dichotomy of the two cerebral hemispheres of human brain. As in a chess match between the artist’s drive to the irrational and his inclination to the rational, Paolo Bottarelli is giving life to a chess board of possibilities, a combination of moves that foster an holistic solution to the detachment.

Entanglement is a wall installation composed by three canvases painted with oil and acrylic.
The destruction of a dualistic reality is here overcome by the epiphany of a third entity, a platform recalling the medieval “predella”. In later medieval and Renaissance altarpieces, where the main panel consisted of a scene with large static figures, it was normal to include a predella below with a number of small-scale narrative paintings depicting incidents from the life of the dedicatee. In Entanglement this third canvas is appearing above two separated and mirrored “icons”, losing its illustrative function to become a tool to unify the two mirror images and to give the birth to a new icon.