These days at Palazzo Reale, there’s a tailored exhibition of paintings by Paolo Troilo. It lasts until September 13th and it’s hosted in the so-called Princes Apartments, a wing rich with the layered history of Palazzo Reale and, by association, of Milan itself.
Paolo Troilo (Taranto, 1972) is an Italian hyperrealist artist with a background in advertising, famous for his large-scale, figurative finger paintings. Both his distinctive technique and his attention to the human body, alongside his distinctive workflow through patronage, emerge from this personal installation, in collaboration with the legendary fabric manufacturer Rubelli.
The “Breach” in the title of the exhibition is a breach in the walls of Palazzo Reale, as the artworks are painted on wall tapestries, giving the idea that the human figures are ripping the wall coverings to emerge and tell their stories. This tension is well-exemplified by a reinterpretation of the Vitruvian Man, already produced by Troilo for Palazzo Reale, but the other stories have mostly to do with power, with the royal figures who walked the corridors of Palazzo Reale.
Now, the approach is certainly interesting, and I applaud the idea of telling the story of these rooms through the historical figures who passed through these rooms. Unfortunately, while Troilo doesn’t shy away from sensitive topics such as fascism and racism, his priggish texts have the result of toning down the powerful art, and sometimes give it a twist in the opposite intended direction. Maybe there’s a reason artists usually don’t write their own captions. Some examples?
The Torn Sleeve
The room is dedicated to the demolition of medieval Milan around Piazza del Duomo, one of the worst crimes in urbanism that the fascist regime ever committed. If you know me, you know how furious I get every time we touch on that subject.
Here, the art tells a story of futurism, of people being too high up their own asses to understand what they’re trampling. I might be fine with it.
The text talks of a dictator who “maybe was distracted by the spotlight,” who maybe “didn’t take the time to understand whether it made sense to demolish something beautiful.” This excusantism is unforgivable. Fascism doesn’t erase the past by mistake: it’s systemic and systematic. Erasure and overwriting is how it operates. We need to be careful about this, because it’s happening all over again.
José
Queen Marie-José of Belgium was the unfortunate wife of Umberto II, and she was queen for 34 days in 1946. During World War II, while she was Princess of Piedmont, she tried to mantain open diplomatic channels with other Countries outside the Italian-German disgraceful alliance, and tried to broker a peace treaty with the United States, unsuccessfully and independently to the point of being sent into domestic exile by her own family when her failed attempts were discovered. According to figures close to Mussolini, she either tried or succeeded in seducing bald-head. Of course, when you try to discredit a woman, you spread sexual rumours.
What we know for a fact is that she actively supported partisans, supplying them with weapons and money from Switzerland.
Troilo decides to stress her support of the resistance, depicting her in anger while masculing hands breaking the symbolic fasces spring from an abyss beneath her. A strong image indeed. Sadly, I have to object to the idea of having that figure springing from the raised skirts of the unfortunate May Queen.
The White Snake
Milan’s symbol is here interpreted in a way I never heard of: a white snake swallowing a blackamoor. The version I knew, is the other way around: while Bonifacio of Pavia was fighting the Turks, his son is kidnapped and swallowed by a snake; upon his return from the war, he hunts the snake down, kills it, and the son springs from its belly, right as rain.
Anyway, Troilo uses the snake as a chance to talk about xenophobia: the white snake is a symbol of fear, fear of the stranger, of those who judge from the colour of the skin. Troilo here doesn’t shy away from attacking this way of thinking. His depiction is a vortex, a black hole, an ouroboros. The depiction of the black man is glorious, and yet both art and text don’t speak of integration: they speak of conflict. “The serpent intent on swallowing is itself swallowed.”
If you want to attack fear, I don’t think this is the best possible phrasing.
Other rooms include the representation of Queen Margherita di Savoia as an influencer (I might be too old for this shit, but I always roll my eyes at these attempts to connect with a younger audience, and I think the younger audience does too), naked Napoleon with strategically-placed stars, and a room dedicated to mothers (not a single woman in sight).
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