On Wednesday 28 May from 6 – 9 pm, the exhibition Hyperbaric-Hypobaric Preview opens at the Guido Costa Projects gallery in via Mazzini 24, Turin.

This exhibition of work by Paul Etienne Lincoln, a fragment of a large-scale project whose seminal elements have already been shown in New York, includes the first European screening of Undine's Curse as well as the presentation of some previously unseen work produced during shooting.

As with all earlier work by the artist, Hyperbaric-Hypobaric Preview grows out of a multifarious, lyrical-poetic rereading of some scientific paradigms, in this instance correlated with the breathing of living creatures. The film embarks on a sort of initiatory journey connecting water and air, the worlds beneath the waves and in the skies to create a visionary synthesis of phylogeny and ontogenesis.

The film stars an undine, a mythological being who leads a precarious existence between species, who, like mermaids, is capable of breathing under and above water, providing a real link between high and low worlds, between the cosmos and the watery depths. The journey she undertakes is resplendent with symbols that bear witness to this ambiguity and small esoteric traces that accompany her evolution: the sponge, the accordion, the balloon, deep-sea divers, all of which are “filtering”, homeostatic elements who nurture themselves on air and are bound to their own condition of continual transformation.

The film’s intentionally fairytale structure and temporal ambiguity, as it weaves between fiction and scientific documentation, life and dreams, dialogue perfectly with Paul Etienne Lincoln’s previous artistic experimentation; and it is a rare example of the great alchemic récit orchestrated by man and machine. As was the case with Sinfonia Torinese (2004) and The Velocity of Thought (2006), both presented in via Mazzini, mechanics guide us through the story.

In this work mechanics is represented by the accordion, the diving suit and the hyperbaric chamber, a role played in the previous work by distillers, peristaltic pumps and combustion engines. It was decided to exhibit only some key seminal elements in the form of sculptures from the large New York installation presented in a fragmented form at Alexander and Bonin in New York.

True to form the visionary ingeniousness of Paul Etienne Lincoln is once again revealed in this extremely complex, sophisticated and personal project. We are delighted to be able to host this previeuw while waiting for the completion of Hyperbaric-Hypobaric, planned for 2010.

Undine's Curse and the relics of Hyperbaric-Hypobaric will be on show in the gallery until 3 July 2008.