At 9 p.m. on Saturday 10 November 2012 the exhibition Square Circle Star Cross Waves by Paul Fryer opens at the Guido Costa Projects gallery in Turin.
Five years since his powerful installation Martyr, which marked his debut on the Italian art scene, Paul Fryer has returned to Turin with a selection of recent work, specially created for the gallery space.
Ever since his first appearance on the art scene in the early 90s Paul Fryer has been exploring the subtle line separating the natural and supernatural; science and how it is communicated have provided him with an immense archive of paradoxes and marvels to explore. While scientific laws and the results of recent scientific experiments provide the impetus behind the machines, sculptures and installations created by the artist, the work itself originates where that of the scientist ends, as he transposes the analytical coldness of scientific experiment into the furnace of artistic creation. Whereas Martyr seemed to pay homage to the unfortunate victims who hung early urban power lines during the last century, deliberately scrutinising the visible and verifiable world of history, these new pieces on show lead us into a strange new alien land, bordering on the possible and impossible, where we are made to question the relationship between reality and fiction. Fryer takes us there along an almost olde world path. His work has the effect of a popular almanac, drawing us into a magical world where the real and fantastic are blended into science, a world where mystery and ambiguity challenge scientifically explainable world.
Levitation, extrasensory communication and optical illusions all play a part in the latest show Paul Fryer is inviting us to see, almost as if the exhibition were a circus-like, travelling show of curios he has brought to town.
It is as if he were playing with the truthfulness of scientific facts, by doing so reminding us that the wealth of meaning in dreams may sometimes conceal the ultimate truth of a phenomenon.
The Dreamer, the real centrepiece of the exhibition, is almost homage to the golden age of Spiritism, when levitation, more than conjuring up the dead was one of the more controversial attractions. This was the case with the Neapolitan fortune teller Eusapia Palladino, who was such a master at drawing the international spotlight of public opinion on him that he attracted the attention not only of academics of the rank of Cesare Lombroso (who penned a famous essay about him), but also Nobel Prize winners such as Pierre and Marie Curie, and Charles Richet. The same could be said of another piece in the exhibition, created with Karl Zener cards, a sort of visual tool for experimenting thought transmission (ESP), which later became popular during magic performances. And last but not least, we have the “chromatropes” by Sir David Brewster, which Fryer offers us in an entirely new setting. Created during the Victorian epoch as a testbed for the many colour theories, they are closely related to the more famous kaleidoscope and early magic lanterns, which themselves passed from the marvellous and intricate world of the scientist’s laboratory to the then popular world of pseudoscience.
Paul Fryer likes to investigate such paradoxes, transforming them into works of Apollonian perfection, endorsed by the precious nature of the materials he employs: wax, polished metals, precious woods. This is where the seductive force of his work lies, born as it is out of a fine balance of the materials and an occult history of ideas.
Everything has been reworded according to the lexicon of contemporary art into a subtle blending of references that range from hyperrealism to arte povera, from Gordon Matta Clark to Susan Hiller until the artistic experiments by Duchamp and Man Ray, making this a powerful and uniquely evocative show.
The exhibition will remain open to the public during gallery opening times until the end of January 2013.

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Paul Fryer (Leeds 1964) is one of the most representative figures on the contemporary British art scene. He has exhibited in Europe and the US and his work can be found in many of the most important public and private art collections around the world. This is his second exhibition in the Guido Costa Projects gallery.