HYPERSURFACE

PATRIZIO TRAVAGLI

The works of Patrizio Travagli invite us to turn our thoughtful attention to the disturbing singularity of the mirrors. How many times have we been fooled by mirrors? How many times, even if for a few moments, have we believed that the reflected image was the continuation of reality, that the mirror was a window or a door, the simple entrance not to Wonderland, as Lewis Carroll’s Alice teaches us , but of our common and habitual everyday world? How many times, as Freud recounts in Beyond the pleasure principle (1920), we played with the reflection of the mirror and, in the same way as our nephew Ernst, we enjoyed appearing and disappearing, pretending to be there and then, sudden, of not being there anymore?

Extract from the text by Andrea Tagliapietra for the book “Patrizio Travagli – Mirrors: Deceit and revelation” on the occasion of the personal exhibition at the residence of the Italian ambassador to the United States and the Italian Embassy in Washington DC.