Biography
Enrica Borla sets herself into Figurative Arts through collage and assemblage techniques, recombining them in boxes called “recollection display cases”. The first display cases were created exclusively on commission for private customers, known by the artist personally, and belong now to private collections.
The display cases are handiworks and serve an icon function wherein there’s a crossing over of the elements of reality, a bargaining power that sets freeze-frame with objects and images that belong to our collective memory. The display cases act as narrative scenes, the settings for little chunks of reality, charged with the task, case by case, of reminding, exorcising, questioning, summarising: machinae memorialis , maps of memory, spying thorough a peephole in the forest of symbols and references that surround us, shaping us as we are now.
A display case is a chink of light revealing details which are normally overlooked but which, on taht tiny proscenium, regain a sense of meaning and poetry. Little toys, newspaper cuttings, photographic stills, trinkets, reclaimed materials, but also drawings, graphics, collages, fusions of trifling, everyday objects transfigured into dramatic and comic roles. Enrica Borla’s display cases are books, but one written not just with words; they tell a story, either single or multifarious, recombining reality, evoking charming suggestions, gambling on the subtle association of ideas tightrope.
Within the confined space/display case, in the backdrops of collages, in the characters and objects which popolates the scenes, even in the titles of the works themselves, are to be found continual reminders of literature, cinema, news report, music, art, politics, customs and habits: a game of recall, assonance, association.
