At 7 p.m. on Thursday 22 September the exhibition Barona – The House of Dirty Games opens at the Guido Costa Projects in via Mazzini 24, Turin.

This series of work by the artist Fabio Paleari, ever faithful to his vocation as a crooner, shifts between black humour and crude realism to recount the story Milan’s historic multiethnic neighbourhood Barona.

In a narrow gambling den hidden between apartment blocks, Lady D stakes her body in a bet. It’s a sticky summer evening, one of those nights when anything can happen, or nothing at all.

Barona explores this suspended time, shifting between real and fiction, between the permitted and illicit, between past and present. Barona is a metaphor, firstly for a place and as a result also time. It is somewhere else.

Paleari almost works against himself here, honing his customary vivaciousness, as he pursues his relentless investigation of the human body, into producing three minimal elements: a slideshow, photography and a magazine. The realism his work feeds on appears to be looking for different expressive outlets, beginning with the magazine, a perfect rendition in terms of colour and layout of soft-core magazines from the early 70s and continuing up to the original sound track of the slideshow, composed by Howie B, a sort sequence featuring some unexpected classical elements.

Like any successful organism Barona is no frills but lacks nothing. It works perfectly as a simple apology of ambiguity.

The exhibition will remain open to the public until 5 November 2011.

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Fabio Paleari lives in Milan. Barona - The House of Dirty Games is his fourth exhibition at the Guido Costa Projects gallery.
Ever since the Ibiza years, where he documented the Leu family - one of the most renowned community of tattoo artists in the world - until his London work with Pete Doherty and Kate Moss and their love story, to whom he dedicated a book and the excellent exhibition I wan’t Give Up in 2008, right up until his most recent independent cinema work with Howie B, Fabio Paleari has proven himself to be consistent and original photographer whose work is in line with most radical adventures in new international photography. He has exhibited in Italy and abroad, both in museums, galleries and private foundations. His work is held in important Italian and European collections.