Rando Paola

I don’t think one can separate a sculptor from the material she moulds with her chisels and mallets; one cannot divide her creative energy from the matter she breaks and turn to dust with the aid of her tools and the strength of her own hands.
Obviously there is an idea, a background, a personal story between the rock and the person shaping it. With Paola Rando I truly feel there is an intimate communion between the material being transformed and the person transforming it. There is an unravelling of boundaries between the creator and the created.
When I hold and touch Paola’s sculptures, when I allow my gaze to follow the soft and fertile curves, to lose myself inside those alien primordial eyes that somehow feel so close, I can’t help but think of the genesis.
The history of the Earth.
The origin of marble: infinite multitudes of stratified skeletons, compressed by immeasurable forces, liquefied by heat, by the planet’s incandescent breath. Every form of fossil has disappeared from that marble, pressed, erased. Every space obliterated. Every memory of the past cancelled, traces of millions of infinite creatures, the intrusion of multi-coloured clay, of landslides, sea waves and volcanic eruptions. Of these natural phenomena only the metamorphosis remains, the unexpected flaming, the patterns in the rock, or the candid absence of any sign or trace.
But the memory still remains, it’s ontological.
That marble simply would not exist without all that history. I don’t want to find meaning in Paola’s sculptures. As I observe them, I realise I don’t need to find a meaning that can be expressed through concepts; I prefer to listen and sense; and what I sense is an emulsion of ancient forces that often express the Earth’s feminine creative power.
What I feel is the transcendence of the dichotomy between matter and soul. As I touch these marble shapes, with their ancient history, as I sense their cool freshness under my skin, I find proof that there is no difference. It is the sculpted material that whispers so, the strength of the hands that moulded it that reveals so.
There is no separation between matter and man, between the soul and the Earth.
This is what Paola tells us. There is an ancient and common seed that unites is to the rocks, the wind, and the sea; this metamorphic rock unites us to the beginning of the universe and to the birth of every form of life.
Thank you Paola for making these rocks fertile.

Eugenio Gardella.