Peep-Hole Sheet #23: PAOLO ICARO: ETR 485 CARROZZA 3 POSTO 15.

A train ride from Pesaro to Milan and a random conversation with another passenger are the narrative context used to frame several passages drawn from old notebooks. Ideas, thoughts, and observations that Paolo Icaro wrote in the Sixties and Seventies, brought together here for the first time and presented with thesame directness and spontaneity with which they were jotted down years ago.

The experience of travel, and the movement through space and time that it implies, merges with the dialogue between the two travelers and the reflections in the notes to create a leap of meaning in which “space and time coincide … two sides ofthe same coin”. The split narrative voice also fuses together different time periods, as what was written in thepast is reread in the present, sometimes with a degree of self-criticism.

Published in conjunction with Icaro’s show “Appunti di Viaggio 1967-2014” at Peep-Hole, these “travel notes” round out the exhibition by offering an introduction to or immersion in the concepts underpinning the works on view and the artist’s practice as a whole.