In the ancient world, the word “oracle” referred to both a sacred place and a prophecy. Pilgrims went to a given location with questions about unknowns, waiting for the divinity to provide an answer. In Orta San Giulio, the artist created a “place-beyond”, a collection of passages between reality and imaginary dimensions. Not far from the garden of Villa Bossi, a mysterious portal – the Oracle – rises from the waters, begging to be contemplated and questioned from the shore. Spectators wait on a pier, where festive, hand-painted flags serve as banners of halted spells, magical figures, and traces of timeless oracles. The fantastical takes possession of the real, waiting to welcome whoever – or whatever – will pass under the arch seen in the distance.
These works were inspired by the village’s archaic identity, which contains a multitude of narratives and legends. It is said that San Giulio liberated the island from monsters, and that the largest among them took refuge in a cave. Centuries later, in that same cave, a large vertebra appeared, which is still preserved today in the Basilica. As Gianni Rodari’s Il Barone Lamberto tells it, a prophecy helped the protagonist survive on the island, the “Idyll of Orta,” with a mysterious kiss on the Sacred Mount between Friedrich Nietzsche and Lou Salomé. And finally, the island, the stage where many past wars played out, is now the site of a cloistered monastery, a place where silence and mysticism reign.

Paolo Brambilla’s (Lecco, 1990) multidisciplinary artistic practice uses speculative processes and formal permutations, taking on or distorting different production and reproduction formats; they could be natural or artificial, real or virtual. Their aim is to address the infinite cycles of cultural product assimilation, dispersion and transformation. Assuming forms and transformations, following different paths, imitating movements, obscuring and repeating gestures, Brambilla has established a dense vocabulary of materials, symbols and references, moving by association between a variety of registers. In Brambilla’s artistic quest, the art object is conceived as a matrix of multiple approaches, and the artistic process a fusion. It’s a synthesis of radically divergent scales, rhythms and sources into an [apparently] congruent whole, the art object itself.