LAURINA PAPERINA
I want to believe

Banca Sistema_Largo Augusto, 1A/Via Verziere, 13. Milano
19.04.2023 – 30.11.2023

Laurina Paperina was born in 1980 in Duckland, a small village deep in the Universe, where she lives and works. She describes herself as a creature with a human head and a duck’s body—or vice versa. As a child, she dreamed of becoming a Saint Seiya Knight, but due to her limited athletic abilities, she chose the darker path of contemporary art. After studying at the Art Institute of Rovereto, she graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Verona. Popular culture lies at the heart of her practice. Laurina draws, paints, creates installations and video animations: any surface can become a starting point for inventing creatures and worlds. Cinema, comics, video games, art, politics, current affairs and popular imagery are constantly reinterpreted and recontextualised through mash-ups, irony and distortion.

For the exhibition I want to believe, Laurina presents a selection of works produced over the past five years at Palazzo Largo Augusto, the Milan headquarters of Banca Sistema. The exhibition opens with Suicide Island (2017), an island surrounded by a sea of lava where characters drawn from popular culture desperately try to survive. Olaf from Frozen, the Teletubbies, Flat Eric, Felix the Cat and other figures find themselves in a surreal and violent scene, where the artist’s irony coexists with an unexpected glimpse of hope. The exhibition continues with works from the series How to kill the artists and Loser (Superfake), centred on the idea of revenge and characterised by the artist’s direct and irreverent style. Peter Pan is killed by Captain Hook, Sylvester finally catches Tweety, Frida Kahlo decapitates herself, and Louise Bourgeois becomes trapped inside one of her own works. Originating from a series of video animations begun in 2007, How to kill the artists targets Laurina herself as well as some of the most celebrated contemporary artists, transforming their hypothetical deaths into a grotesque comedy. Her visual language combines children’s illustration, comics and American cartoons with references to the internet, television and 1980s and 1990s horror cinema, often pushing the narrative towards splatter. Among the more recent works are pieces created for I giovani non hanno più (2021), an exhibition reflecting on contemporary society and the influence of the internet and social media. Memes become a metaphor for increasingly rapid and simplified communication. In Smile! The end is near, a smile transforms into a skull, while in the Teletubbies painting Have a nice day, an apparently positive message is subverted through the artist’s characteristic irony. The centrepiece of the exhibition is Death/Resurrection, a large 200×150 cm painting created over the course of two years. It is one of Laurina’s most personal works, almost an allegorical self-portrait in which pop-cultural figures coexist with references to her own life. At the centre, the artist herself is struck by pencils fired by angels, a metaphor for her ambivalent relationship with art and her own practice. Dalí’s melting clock evokes a sense of time that can seem endless or pass too quickly; meanwhile, a winged skull, rather than representing death, becomes a symbol of resurrection. Recurring figures from Laurina’s personal mythology also appear, including her dog Zelda and the smoking rat Bubo. The work deliberately leaves room for interpretation, blending autobiography, memory and imagination. The most recent works continue this reflection on the present through a constantly evolving mix of references. In Greta Thunberg VS Methane Emissions, the activist confronts a cow responsible for pollution; in Sex, drugs and rock’n roll, Kermit the Frog becomes the protagonist of a scene of self-destruction; while Ice Cream I Scream transforms an ice cream into a disturbing appearance of Wes Craven’s Scream. In contrast, I want to believe in something introduces an alien duck flying above a small UFO, suggesting a possible message of hope. Eight drawings devoted to “famous rats”—from Bat Rat to Mickey Rat, Super Rat and The Suicide of Banksy’s Rat—further demonstrate the artist’s ability to appropriate icons from popular culture and art, transforming them into new characters through play and mash-up. Among the larger paintings is Burning Owl Island (2019), where characters and symbols from contemporary art—from Paul McCarthy and Banksy to Claes Oldenburg, Martin Kippenberger, Warhol and Koons—become part of a surreal “revenge” that alludes to contemporary issues such as war, pollution, drought and climate change. Another reference to current events is the Plague Doctor mask, evoking the Covid-19 pandemic. For Laurina, painting is also a way of recording and reinterpreting the events of the present, keeping the memory of the past alive.

The exhibition concludes with In Pink Pig We Trust, an ironic reinterpretation of the American motto In God We Trust. At the centre of the scene, a piggy bank—symbol of Banca Sistema and metaphor for saving and liquidity—is worshipped by the characters, who offer artworks, objects, loved ones and dreams as pledges for the future. Among them are references to Maurizio Cattelan, Keith Haring, Banksy, Snoopy, SpongeBob and the Care Bears. Through her ironic, chaotic and irreverent universe, Laurina Paperina looks at a present often deprived of certainty, transforming pop culture, personal memory and current events into tools for interpreting the world. I want to believe thus becomes an affirmation of faith: an invitation, despite everything, to keep believing in something.