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february 16, 2023 - Spazio Punch

PAREIDOLIA. I see faces everywhere


A commonly experienced phenomenon where our pre-existing knowledge of the world merges with our illusions and the subconscious, pareidolia has been for long time considered a symptom of psychosis. Indeed, it is a universal cognitive process that subtends humankind’s reassuring need to recognize and therefore familiarize with the unknown. There are countless of examples of faces and other objects seen in the clouds, the moon and in the colour grades of the sky. One fact remains: does what we think to see really exist? Has  it ever existed or have we ever seen it?

Pareidolia brings together seven international artists and designers, whose selected works explore themes

of artifice, fantasy, abstraction, identity, self-representation, spirituality, subversion and the subconscious too. It does so by the means of an illusionary encounter with a series of differently shaped masks, disguised in mirrors, flags, sculptures, vases, carpets and photographic portraits of shaman-like anonymous personas directing mysterious ancestral rites.

From pagan rituals to political actions, the mask has been used as a tool to experience alternative forms of selfexpression and a vehicle to enter in a body and state of mind other than ours. Among the oldest historical artefacts that the human being has invented, shaped, designed or drawn, the mask has a long cultural history–one deeply characterized by the search for the ontological (immaterial) selfhood. When we wear a mask, who or what is the real subject of that experience? How does the conscious suddenly leave space to the unconscious?

In Pareidolia artworks become metaphysical objects–they are characters emerging from a reality that stands outside our material perception of the surrounding world. They are symbols of protest hidden behind colourful geographical patterns; ropes modelled into eccentric yet ironic figures of the self and its intuitions; ceramic creatures where the experiential quality of the artist’s thoughts and feelings is condensed in the absence of a recognizable form; mirroring surfaces in which we either get lost or find ourselves; tapestries and vases that open the door to the opportunity of reimagining the cultural history of humankind.

In the different articulations of a collective search for another imaginable “I”, all exhibited works provide some theoretical possibilities of a reality that supersedes the limitations of our mind. Even when we rule out everything else, isn’t it true –ironic but strangely satisfying–that still we are left with the desire for some experience of the unconscious?

The Bookzilla bookshop of #spaziopunch presents a selection of authors, who dialogue with the Pareidolia exhibition, making its imaginaries and atmospheres explode. On display Cochae's Sharakumen; Michael Etzensperger's Masken; Axel Hoedt's Noki; Kafka for Kids by Rose Rosen; Porträt and L'Homme et l'œuvre by Christoph Ruckhäberle; Katja Schwalenberg's A Question of Perspective; and many others.