ACME ArtBOARD #1: Nicole Bolpagni
On the occasion of the sixteenth Giornata del Contemporaneo [Italian Contemporary Art Day], ACME Art Lab presents ACME ArtBOARD. Promoted by AMACI – Association of Italian Contemporary Art Museums, in collaboration with MAECI – Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and DGCC – Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of MiBACT, the initiative aims to narrate the vitality of Italian Contemporary art. For this edition the modality is both online and offline, creating a great communication campaign to encourage the participation of as many realities as possible, promote and bring out the network of national and international Contemporary art.
The event opens today, 5 December 2020, and will be available until 11 December 2020 on the platform www.giornatadelcontemporaneo.org.
ACME ArtBOARD is a column created to bring the public closer and provide a new approach to contemporary art, involving young and emerging artists who, by telling each other about themselves, reveal their personal way of being Artists.
The medium used is a moodboard, a series of images joined together as in a collage that show in a visual format a project and all the elements related to it, anticipated by a short interview.
The artists have made themselves known starting from their studies and arriving to their future aspirations, creating a composition in which their creative ideas, the materials related to them and the tools of doing are shown. Each artist interprets the moodboard in an original and unique way, providing the reader with new scenarios useful to understand the meaning of being an Artist at 360 degrees.
The first Artist is Nicole Bolpagni.
ACME – What motivated you and why to start your studies/career as an artist?
NB – Art has always been part of my life. As a child I spent a lot of time with my older brother, decorator and master of art, who constantly stimulated me from this point of view; I used to paint and draw alongside him in what years later became my studio. With time I realized that what had been born as a possibility had turned into a necessity. When I was a teenager I was attending the Agricultural Technical Institute and I realized that to feel better I wanted to turn my passion into my life and vice versa. It was this feeling that pushed me to abandon all certainty and undertake a path and artistic research as conscious as possible.
ACME – What are your aspirations for the future?
NB – If they had asked me this question a few years ago I would have answered differently; Today, however, thanks to the path I have taken, I have acquired a different vision of art. The studies I have undertaken in recent years have given me the opportunity to conceive it in a different way, from a practical and more rewarding point of view. It is a too complicated historical context in which I find little sense and it is counterproductive to talk about personal aspirations. So, to answer in a simplistic but heartfelt way, it would be enough for me to be different from what I was yesterday and worse than the woman I will be tomorrow. I no longer see art as something necessary only and exclusively to myself, I think it makes more sense to create to leave something to someone through a workshop, a course, but also a work: what interests me is to make art with and for others to communicate and to grow individually.
THE MOODBOARD
The most important line of thought and to which I associate myself in artistic production is alchemy. For this reason I chose to start the moodboard with a fundamental volume: Alchemy and Mystique by Alexander Roob.
There is alchemy in everything, the individual is present in everything, and that is why the microcosms I create contain the fragments of the world that I try to trap and make my own. The suggestions through which I come into contact with reality are the raw and dirty material to purify and shape with delicacy and care so that, at the arrival of the new spring dawn, the garden of my inner visions can flourish again. Investigating the symbology hidden in the research, I follow the red thread through the fog. Granting myself from time to time the pleasure of suffering which, after all, is also one of the most bodily ways of feeling alive.
In the moodboard I decided to include recurring elements in my research that appear as a florilegy of representations linked to each other by a poetic and narrative imaginary. Erotic collages and small finds alternate with ink drawings and the scribbles of a ballpoint pen, dealing with human archetypes.
The rose and its thorns, black and white, evil and good, day and night, life and death are just some of the complementary polarities that can be found in the style table. It reveals itself as an intimate diary, which is why I chose to include the notebook, the medium par excellence. It is possible to penetrate into the depths of human interiority by shedding light on the contradictions that coexist in it, crossing fragile boundaries beyond which, sometimes, one encounters darkness and transience, sometimes, one finds oneself in the light of an alchemical vital process. The perennial struggle between harmony and chaos and the constant and utopian search for a balance, which never remains so, make my nights without stars a romantic and tragic inner story, which I would like to vaguely remember the emotion you feel when you read for the first time The flowers of evil by Charles Baudelaire.
Nicole Bolpagni
Nicole Bolpagni is a visual and intermedia artist, born in June 1992. She graduated in Visual arts at the Giacomo Carrara Academy of Fine Arts in Bergamo.
She completed her artistic study in the Art Communication and Education Master’s deegree course at the SantaGiulia Academy of Fine Arts in Brescia, graduating in May 2020 with full marks.
She currently lives and works in Brescia. She is developing her artistic production together with artistic teaching and conceiving and conducting creative and expressive workshops.