A cross look at Casa Mollino through canvases, photographs and polaroids

Looking at the Casa Mollinos interior, we immediately think about the atmosphere of the Vittoriale by D’Annunzio, those interiors described with meticulous and morbidity in the pages of À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans. And yet, Carlo Mollino from Turin had nothing in common with the bohemian personality, the suffering aesthete of fin de siècle: his artistic research was always firmly anchored to rationalism, to engines, to the technique’s rigour. His existence was that of a private personality, far from the spotlight and exuberance. His Casa, which he renovated and furnished as a cabinet de curiosités, was for him always a utopian place of escape, the Ideal (in which, among other things, he never lived).

Perhaps, it was the mystery that binds it to its creator that stimulated the Puerto Rican artist Enoc Perez to reinterpret those spaces within his large-format canvases, from which emerges an indefinite vision, dreamlike, sometimes feverish. The same objects, furniture, details, home corners and domestic fragments become the protagonists of Brigitte Schindler’ artworks, whose post-produced photographs imbue every detail with an overflowing sensuality and sinuosity. In a crescendo of eroticism a bit voyeur, the path of Mollino/Insides culminates in a small space hidden by velvet curtains, beyond which dominate all the women of Carlo Mollino: on the polaroid exposed – some original, other reprints – the models wink in seductive poses, friends or lovers, immortalized in the middle of the night maybe, or at the first light of dawn. A portion of intimate life of which only a partially faded trace remains, a secret that will remain forever silent between Casa Mollino’ walls.