After landing at the dock and walking through the parklike serenity of this walled island, you finally catch a view of the cinema, a pavilion with the same oval rondeur, says the artist, as the great Fenice Theater. Though it functions as a theater showing documentary films and holds an audience of 35 to 40 on its stepped rows of square seats, the pavilion retains a special intimacy and scale that make viewers feel they are entering an architectural model itself. On the outside, Putrih assembled a seemingly random (though actually precise) criss-cross installation of rusted trusswork bolted into place. Inside, he hung a white canvas curtain that darkens the interior and designed an inner wall with plywood baffles cut into wiggling, biomorphically shaped slats that recall the Paradise’s decorative forms.
During the biennale, the pavilion served as a venue for documentary films. But the main event was between shows, as it once must have seemed to children at the Paradise Theater. The canvas curtain is drawn back, and slowly, the undulating plywood slats are brought alive by flames of gold, then red light, like a spectacular sunrise. The theater becomes a place apart from its surroundings, a regal folly in the garden. And just before the colored lights subside, the pavilion’s shallow-domed ceiling grabs your attention with projected clouds that gradually dim into a starry night. Leaving Venetian, Atmospheric at night is like leaving one of those lively, brightly lit Venetian campi filled with joyous crowds and heading out into the dark, narrow, and quiet streets.
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