Flo
—overview—
'The embrace'
Exhibition curated by Laila Calantzopoulos
July 2023
In the last few years my work has been oriented towards research on the relationship between the body and painting. The series ¨The embrace¨ stems from an injury: a shoulder injury prevented me from performing habitual movements that, so ordinary, are lost in oblivion. Faced with the impossibility of painting, I could only look inwards. I traveled to the confines of my territory to confirm what I already felt: painting is the body and the body is painting.
Since then, the individual organism and the social organism have tuned in to a common process: configuring a different way to pass the days. Painting saved me. The desire to reconnect with her helped me to trust and to move on. Though not without discipline, as curing a body and painting both require patience. With each treatment, my fragmentary anatomy followed the path towards unity. Work after work, I rediscovered the coming and going of my entrails towards the canvas and from the color to the flesh. A force began to spread from my core towards the shoulder blades, which spread like wings. The entire body began to move avidly and to expand towards the collective, to transcend from its own towards the universal, and return on the same path.
The set of works that make up this series oscillates between the charm of the sinister and the return of a past that abandons familiar logic and seeks new questions for an ambiguous present. It is an invitation to halt in another kind of passing. Inhabit the oil’s tempo to find sediments of multiple art histories among the glazes. Fragments that look straight at whoever observes them, to reveal unknown wisdom. Wisdom which evokes memory of our true power.
Today, I am ready to embrace again. With my visceral body and with my body that, because of being pictorial, is no less vehement.
— Exhibition —
The embrace, July—Sep 2023. Botschaft der Argentinischen Republik, Berlin.
Interwoven
SPACE 776 GALLERY
MANHATTAN, NEW YORK
Space776 | New York is pleased to present the winner of our solo show open call Florencia De Giovanni Pacini. Flo's solo exhibition Interwoven invites viewers to contemplate the unseen connections that sustain life, the intricate web of interdependence within nature, and the interconnectedness that binds all living creatures, urging a deeper understanding of our place within this complex, beautiful tapestry.
In the exhibition's eponymous painting, Interwoven, Pacini uses fantastical elements and rich, layered symbolism to explore themes of femininity, nature, and the subconscious. The dreamlike quality of Interwoven echoes the surrealist tradition of blurring reality and imagination, creating a narrative that invites introspection and interpretation. The mystic and the profane, the sensual and fleshy - all are present in Flo's work, combined in unexpected ways.
The female figure in Pacini's paintings connects the feminine mystique and strength and employs lush environments to explore themes of identity and existence. Always reaching towards or blending into nature, Flo's protagonists are caught in moments of reverence.
The Interwoven exhibition manifests a promise to honor and nurture the earth daily, a blood pact spanning generations, from our ancestors to us, who carry within our bodies the life of plants defying gravity. Each painting in the exhibition serves as a visual poem, an echo of ancient traditions, capturing the delicate balance and unity in our world and reflecting a return to the essential. By observing circumstances of the inherent nature of the human body, Flo suggests an understanding of delicate life balance within the environment through the forces of nature, gratitude to creation, cycles, life-giving forces, human life, and the rhythms of the natural world.
— Exhibition—
Interwoven, September -October. 2024. Space 776, New York
The Embrace II
Atelier Gallería/ Alexine Good, Berlín Alemania
'El Caldero'
Exhibition text by Lula Mari
May 2021
A body of colour moves between green and red, oscillating between areas of light and shadow. The hues melt, separate, draw a dimension and return to the mist, which is as much air as it is water.
There is something brewing in Flo Giovanni Pacini's paintings.
The surface of the canvas hollows out to become a vessel that not only contains textures and atmospheres, but also intuitions, mythologies, a pinch of astrology, dreams, nightmares, experiences, the body of a woman who knows she is one and many, the desire to house herself and others.
El caldero (the cauldron) is utilized in festivities to cook sacrificial offerings. It is also the device used by witches to cook their brews. The fire burns beneath el caldero. The food prepared there is more like a potion than a delicacy. It nourishes, yes, but above all, it heals. Cats know this.
A painting that paints the act of painting, and a painting that is experienced as an act of magic.
Perhaps that is why the eyes and hands stand out, going from the painter to the painting as if it were a mirror. Something is grazed before disappearing: some indistinguishable consistency, an intensity.
The painting throbs and summons us to the ritual. It awaits us with its ancient promise renewed.
— Exhibition —
El Caldero, May—Sep 2021. El Más Acá, Cultural Club
Review Martín Palottini
bio
Buenos Aires, 1988. Flo Giovanni Pacini graduated from the Image and Sound Design program at the University of Buenos Aires. She studied drawing and painting in the workshops of Lula Mari and Martín Palottini. She has taken various live model drawing and painting workshops in Grand Central Academy (New York), Florence Academy of Art (Firenze) and Fine Arts Academy (Köln).
She has participated in various salons, some standouts include: The Young Salon of the Eduardo Sívori Museum of Plastic Arts, where she won 1st prize (2015), and the Divine Proportion of Teorema contest (2016) where she won 3rd prize with an exhibition in the Quinquela Martín Museum. She was included in the book, “Best Latin American Illustrators 2015” from the University of Palermo. In 2017 she was selected for the official competition of the 1st International Expanded Corporality Festival.
She won 1st prize to exhibit in Buenos Aires Directo de Artista (BADA, 2019), at La Sociedad Rural Argentina. In 2020 she participated in FlameZine, a transfeminist emerging art magazine from Berlin, Germany and won a scholarship to exhibit at El más acá Cultural Club. In2022 she participated in the Art Basel Miami fair: Virtual Reality with Sublimart NFT and in the WO foundation virtual women's group show, "Disrupted" curated by Sergio Gomez.
Flo took part in multiple individual and group exhibitions in galleries, museums and cultural spaces such as Casa Bastet, Imaginario Gallery - Gallery nights, La Oreja Negra, Gestual Graphic Gallery, Eduardo Museum of Plastic Arts Eduardo Sívori, C.C.Ernesto Sábato, La Fragua Gallery, Library of the National Congress, Dasein House, CHELA, Gallery Besares, El más acá Cultural Club and The Argentine Embassy in Berlin.
In 2024, she was honored to participate in the 43rd Annual Open Painting, Sculpture & Graphics Exhibition at the Salmagundi Club in New York. Her work earned her the prestigious award of a solo exhibition at Space 776 Gallery in Manhattan.
She currently lives in New York City.
Interviews, notes and reviews:
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El destape web (2023) (ESP)
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Ophelia Magazine (2022) (EN/ESP))
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Perceiving realities in Aleco Entretenimiento (2021)
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LA LA LISTA. A list of local artists you should know (2021) (EN)
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Flame Zine "Magia" pág. 41 Ed. en Berlín (2021) (EN)
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Conversation with Lula Mari for El Más acá Club (2020) (ESP)
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Brushstrokes and other condiments by Stella Sidi in Conexión abierta Radio (2019)
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Maleva Magazine. Bada 2019 in Argentine Rural Society : these are the ten must-see artists (2019) (ESP)
Work description
For most of recorded history, women’s private lives have received little respect. How many accomplished actresses and musicians have had interviews about their work reduced to gossip about their romantic life? How many mothers have had their own need for privacy ignored or resented by their families? When female authors write about their lives and relationships it is considered “Chick Lit,” while when men do the same it is considered canon. So perhaps it is jarring here, in de Giovanni Pacini’s work, to see the female psyche spotlit, the outlandish reverie not dismissed but instead relished and slowly savored as the main event.
After all, where are we more free than in our subconscious? Free not to just do but to feel, to examine our true selves via impossible mirrors. Our carnal impulses are revealed, our deepest shames unearthed. We too can be voyeurs, peering under a leafy frond at a nude man bathing. We too can tear at the fish with our teeth. We peer at our reflections through crashing waves, we have cats and birds and pangolins as familiars. We muse over sacred texts, we cast incantations. We die and are reborn and die again. We are not reduced to fantasy but instead the fantasy made real.
Whether spiralling or saturated, De Giovanni Pacini’s compositions invite you to follow the painting into an inner, deep, uterine dimension where the magic of the feminine is distinctly animalistic. Thoughtful or overwhelmed, lustful or despairing, every woman in her paintings holds open a door to the collective female spirit. Her work asks the viewer to consider: what dreams have they awoken from? And which are they still dreaming?