Olivia Paroldi
« I draw from encounters that have resonated with my sensibility. My prints seek to capture and bring to light certain shared emotions; they wander until they graphically achieve a poetic state that translates the silence of certain lives.»
Born in Paris in 1981, trained in applied arts and graduated from the Estienne school, Olivia Paroldi specialized in engraving and illustration. Years of practice in connection with the book industry first allowed her to put her talent to work in the service of transmission and pedagogy. Her illustrations for educational materials and her relief engraving work for the learning of young blind people sensitized her to the world of the child and its poetic imagination. Encounters and experiences that reinforced her profoundly humanistic way of being in the world and her artistic approach: highlighting the invisible to reveal its beauty, with modesty and delicacy. Taking flight as an artist, Olivia Paroldi turned her gaze towards the fragile and vulnerable Other. It was through series of prints that she traced a creative path that resembles her: her work is imbued with infinite tenderness and kindness. For the past ten years, she has been bringing precious splashes to the streets of the cities: her «urban prints» in collages emerge as moments of grace for passersby who know how to open their eyes. These are encounters with beautiful souls whose artist has drawn their features with the lightness of poetry. The prints pasted on the waymarks are as discreet as the invisible ones they represent. The wind and the rain will do their work, revealing the fragments of a beauty ephemeral and precious like the memory of a face and a story. The bluish dichromy of the engraving will fade over the course of the days, weaving a thread between presence and absence. The relationship to the memory of time that marks Olivia Paroldi’s work also stems from this ancestral technique that she puts to use in contemporary questioning. For the artist, who does not want to impose himself by appropriating public space, these street prints are little lives of paper, an invitation to let our imaginations be touched. And beyond the unique aesthetic emotion that can transport us during the contemplation of these collages that tell a story, it is also the humanism that emanates from the artistic project that gives us the opportunity to question the world. Different series of prints have emerged and the artist has made commitments towards protecting children and welcoming lives on the margins.
The series of collages « Les enfants de l’exil » depicts the tragedy played out in the Mediterranean by these migrant children who attempt the crossing from despair to hope. The prints, created as metaphorical staging from faces identified by the artist from archival or current news photos and documentary films, are pasted in emblematic transit locations (stations, ports, border posts…). The series « Des bateaux de papier» illustrates, in the same spirit, the poetic way in which a child recounts a journey at sea. In the Balkans, the artist has also made visible the gazes of refugees navigating Europe in search of benevolent reception. For the series «Mauvaises graines», Olivia Paroldi went to meet the children of the slums, to entrust to our eyes the beauty that emanates from them. She imagined the shacks and makeshift shelters as just as many plants that grow and become the shelters of ’butterfly children« of whom she spreads, through her collages, the wings of a fleeting grace. These encounters and exchanges have not left the artist unscathed, and they evoke our humanity. An artistic project opens up on the issue of the children of cocoa plantations, not forgetting that the gluttony of some sometimes, on the other side of the world, has a bitter aftertaste for others. Finally, the artist also pays tribute to women in his series »Memorable Forgotten«, which highlights engaged female figures from around the world who have not been featured in the media spotlight but who, each in their own way, have worked to make this world a better place. The infinite delicacy of Olivia Paroldi’s engravings and the softness that emanates from the face of the Other made visible is a sublime echo of the work of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, for whom the face is the emergence of the personified other that engages each one in an ethic of responsibility. Olivia Paroldi has participated in numerous collective exhibitions and has also presented her work in solo shows in various galleries or festivals in the Mediterranean region where she resides, in Paris and in Mexico. In workshops and for galleries, she has created a series of watercolours as well as pieces that take on fragments of these urban prints on found materials found in the streets. Olivia Paroldi is one of those artists who open our eyes to see the sublime in the gaze of the Other; for whom grace civilizes us; for whom beauty is a form of humanism.
