After thirty years staring at one true phrase, he discovered that its opposite was true also. For weeks he laughed in the grip of a fierce self-derision. Having lost the falsehood to which he’d fixed his hawser he rolled drunkenly about the field of his environment before the new direction began to dawn upon his cracked mind. What a fool ever to be tricked into seriousness.

(William Carlos Williams)

Fondazione ICA Milano presents from Friday March 24 to Saturday April 22, 2023, What A Fool Ever To Be Tricked Into Seriousness, the first solo institutional exhibition in Europe of the American artist Nathlie Provosty. The exhibition is curated by Alberto Salvadori.

The exhibition stems from the conscious and direct approach that characterizes Provosty's work to investigate the constant misunderstandings that govern the way human beings perceive the world, through a body of oil paintings and works on paper never shown before.

The work of Nathlie Provosty (Cincinnati, USA,1981) is based on an expressive vocabulary that articulates the innumerable themes related to the perception of the human experience. Filled with conscious irony, the artist's works explore elements of our everyday life such as time, space, magnetism, erotism and gravity through a meticulous use of oil paint and paper. The resulting surfaces caress the viewer's sense of awareness, inviting them to trace and interpret the many clues the artist employs to enrich her compositions.

The attitude of directing irony towards one's self permeates the artist's work and is immediately revealed by the title of the exhibition: what a fool ever to be tricked into seriousness, a passage from the text by American poet and physician William Carlos Williams (1883 - 1963), where the main character realizes through an epiphany that he has toiled for years relying on a truth that ultimately turns out to be as truthful as that which was false. The irony is the unravelling of duality and limited perception. The poem unravels duality and one’s conviction of their own rightness.

The exhibition, specifically conceived for Fondazione ICA Milano, brings together a selection of works never presented before together with earlier productions, inviting the visitor to enter a space of pure perception. Nathlie Provosty's paintings and works on paper can be considered as landscapes of shapes and surfaces, where a measured juxtaposition of levels and colours is in place, creating unexpected images as a way to unveil the contradictions of everyone’s life path.

Provosty's straightforward and seductive language emerges, ironically, by way her sincere investigation into the history of art, the materials of the artist, the creation of an abstract lexicon, and the moulding of painting into a time-based medium capable of revealing personal and complex human inquiry. A trick is a cunning act designed to deceive or outwit, however the artist uses sleight of hand manipulations of paint and surfaces to "trip" the viewer into deeper sensitivity to their own feelings and what the painting is actually doing.

Complementing and enriching the exhibition project is a performance of experimental music by New York based artist and composer Gryphon Rue, planned for Tuesday, April 11, 2023. The event is part of the exhibition's public program and will see Gryphon Rue's work, characterized by the use of harmoniums and custom synthesizers, in connection with Nathlie Provosty's works in a unique combination of visual and musical experience.