“ Unité d’habitàtion”, 2010/2016

Unité d’habitation is a project that brings forward from 2010 Parisi’s interests in painting, architecture, sculpture, drawing and etching. The focus of the series is to translate the utopia of Le Corbusier’s Modernist project within the non-functional possibilities of art. It is a series of works in which the orthogonal layering and the division of the surface define the space of the work: sharing and stratification, as happens in the duplex apartments in the well-known residential and urban planning project of the Swiss architect. With the etchings, the artist reflects on the fundamental elements of an expressive technique now considered obsolete, insisting on the potential of its infinite reproducibility through the canons that have constituted it from the beginning: sign, tone and color. There are four overlapping aluminum plates that, according to the classic technique of color printing (CMYK), define two of the many obtainable possibilities: black & white and color. The craftsmanship of the printing process (as well as, in the pictorial works, of the brush strokes mimicking an industrial perfection) introduces the relationship between the act of making and the mechanically engraved plates, as a distinctive sign of an era where the interaction between machine and human being is so stratified as to no longer allow distinctions and boundaries.