rayuela

La rayuela, il gioco del mondo, la settimana, la campana, la marelle, the hopscotch…

Rayuela can be played with a little stone that you must push forward with the tip of your shoe. Ingredients: a pavement, a pebble and a nice drawing made with chalk, preferably in colour. The sky is at the top, earth is below, it is very difficult to get the little stone to reach the sky; almost always the calculations go wrong and the stone slips out of the drawing. Little by little, despite everything, you begin to acquire the necessary skill to jump across the different squares [...] the problem is that just at that point, when almost no one has yet learnt to send the pebble all the way back up to the sky, childhood suddenly comes to an end and you fall into novels, cheap anxieties, and the speculation of another sky you must learn to reach nonetheless. And since you have left childhood behind… you forget that to reach heaven you only need these ingredients: a pebble and the tip of a shoe.
- Julio Cortázar -

 

In her new paintings Alessandra Puppola presents, more clearly than ever, a recurring theme in her production: play, a metaphor for the existential journey of her young girls, which becomes a tool of introspection both for the artist and for those who look at her paintings.

Here Rayuela represents the universal game: between the earth and the sky the entire cosmos takes shape, along with the interdependence of natural elements. Her works frequently evoke the game of the goose, as well as to hide-and-seek. The former in particular, like the hopscotch, represents for the artist the course of life, a cycle of rebirth, characteristic of Buddhist culture.

Children do not play a game, they are the game itself, for them it is real life, neither fiction nor dream. It is also an element bound to nature, to which Puppola continually returns, depicting its features and details in every painting.

Adults, distanced from the natural world and imprisoned by social conventions, have only dreams left to get closer to the age of innocence and to reconnect with nature.

For the first time, in addition to his paintings, Puppola presents three etchings made with different techniques, revealing a new expressive sensibility. Thanks to an invaluable collaboration with the Bottega del Tintoretto, she transposes her little girls onto paper with subtlety and masterful technique.