Ephemeral Trace
Paola Beverini
The sea has been a powerful presence in the human psyche since time immemorial. It symbolizes the origin of life, but also the idea of an open horizon—an invitation to an epic journey that may lead us to distant places. The seascape, present in many of the most important movements in art, is defined by a focus on the sea, emphasizing its natural beauty, its mysterious and untamed character, and its capacity as a metaphor that helps us understand existence. The Great Wave off Kanagawa, by Hokusai—one of the most renowned works of the Ukiyo-e movement (“paintings of the floating world”)—seeks to emphasize the fleeting, transitory nature of the world, a sensation evoked by the rising of the waves and their dissolution. Claude Monet explored the ephemeral effects of light on water, speaking to the changes brought by the passage of time. Gerhard Richter, in his Seestück series, invites us into the contemplation stirred by the horizontal expanse of a calm sea. The seascape can also lead us toward the intimate, personal world with its rhythms and cadences.
The works Paola Beverini presents in this exhibition possess this same effect. In one of them, we see the elegant harmony of a slender piece of plant matter cast ashore at our feet. It is not alone. Its presence forms a web of relationships—not only among material elements such as water, sand, or light, but also with shadows and the reflections born of that fleeting instant. The impression is that of having discovered a tiny landscape, full of life yet ephemeral. For this vision is not destined to endure. It is a blade of vegetation, but also a blade of time. The instant in which we are alive, just before the passage of time and the changes it brings sweep away what once was. The treasure of existence and its fragile transience.
Beverini brings us closer to the vital phenomenon of nature, which is pure movement. The ebb and flow of the sea is her central inspiration: every wave casts upon the shore new proposals that unleash the artist’s imagination. Organic debris, the traces of water that, in its coming and going, inscribe the sand with ever-changing textures, the foam that stretches into designs that will be erased in an instant. This methodical dance, as natural as breathing, evokes a quiet calm. And it is this emotion that the artist’s work awakens in us. For in her pieces we perceive not only objects, but the presence of the observer, someone moved by what she sees.
The ebb and flow of the sea generates a vital rhythm, a heartbeat. Paola Beverini’s works allow us to feel it—not only in the images captured by her camera, but also in that other moment when the artist takes the forms of nature and translates them into her sculptures, which do not appear inert but infused with the breath of existence. And again, we are invited to reflect: the movement of the water resembles that of our own inner lives, where pain and joy, friendship and solitude, anger and tenderness oscillate like a swinging pendulum. The shifting, ephemeral landscapes of nature are also those of our interior world.
If movement is close to life, the stone tears that form part of this exhibition suggest something quite different. They are static, like death. The delicate patience with which Beverini reveals the ethereal beauty around us becomes a cry. We are annihilating the nature that sustains us, extinguishing the radiance of its presence.
Paola Beverini’s works are like a haiku whose studied minimalism appears simple, yet contains overflowing vitality and serene meditation on the meaning of life. They also offer a voice raised in warning, reminding us of the danger of extinction that threatens the natural world—whose survival is necessarily intertwined with our own.