Meet Paolo Iarussi of PI – π in Miracle Mile

Today we’d like to introduce you to Paolo Iarussi.

Paolo, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I was born into an artist household. My father, an Argentinian Big Band Jazz director, and drummer, who spent most of his life in Cali – Colombia. Mother was an award winner Colombian singer and interpreter. I was born in Buenos Aires, then lived in Cali until I was 17, then Miami for 18 years, and now I call the city of LA my home.

Unlike most kids I grew up with, I spent most of my school breaks in empty theaters, backstage and endless hours of rehearsals. Most of this time I spent alone, playing in the darkness with my toys and creating stories and narratives to keep myself entertained. I was never bored. I got to examine theaters from all over the South American continent. Saw how back stages worked, and among ropes, sandbags, makeup, masks, and costumes, I felt more at home than anywhere else.

Of course, this took a toll. It made it very difficult for me to relate to other children my age, and no matter how I tried, I felt like a stranger always. I developed social anxiety, it was hard for me to formulate conversations and this became a huge insecurity, which would eventually become an everlasting depression. I would probably spend two hours per day at psychologist offices, five times a week, for most of my middle school to the near end of high school.

Because of my difficulty interacting, and because classes would bore me I had difficulty paying attention, I was diagnosed with ADD and placed in ceramics classes when I was about eight years old. This changed my world. I now had a view of it that many don’t ever get to see. Of course, I didn’t know this, all I cared about was playing with clay and visualizing my little creations.

Being backstage I was exposed to nudity all the time. I would often hang out in the changing rooms with my mom, and became very comfortable with the human body and its natural state, bare skin. Furthermore, I spent a lot of time with females. Most of the people who took care of me were women, many of them very elegant and refined, which developed in me an intense attraction for a certain quality which is what I seek to capture and display in my own work today.

With the years I continued to become more and more desensitized with the body, and it is very easy to see a nude body as simply a body, just as it is easy to switch back and see a body naked. The difference to me is simple, nude is natural and non-sexual, this can be sensual in nature. Naked implies the mind and creates a vibration in the senses, mostly based on implied sexuality. I can’t tell you how much this has affected my romantic life.

Since I was little, I fell in love with love, and all I ever dreamt of was falling in love and pouring out my heart load onto some fortunate girl. As soon as my friends caught on to liking the opposite gender, I started noticing that “boys being boys” had a lot of implied disrespect for the female figure. Women were seen as objects, trophies, or achievements, and I highly disagreed.

To me women are our mothers, the tree of our life, they mean everything to me. Despite not being able to do anything for years, this notions grew within me. And soon I was able to conceptualize my purpose, and now my work is almost entirely dedicated to show other faces of the female form. Accepting their bodies, understanding their strength, placing themselves in the place they belong in society, rather than letting themselves be placed by others.

The nude body plays an incredibly strong role in my work because it takes away armors, shame, taboos and buckets full of words which we cast as reasons to cover up. I think the body is beautiful, and it should be shown naturally without a problem. Yes, I’m an advocate for #freethenipple, but I say free it all instead!

You didn’t ask, but I will tell you anyway about music. I taught myself the drums at age ten, and continued to play sporadically throughout my life, I learned a little guitar, bass, and messed around with other instruments. For a while there I wanted to pursue my musical career and almost moved to LA in 2010 to study music. I decided to sign up for Visual arts instead and stayed in Miami. I had not stopped working on art, in fact, my younger brother and I had started a company around 2007 called Poetry Of I. It was originally an organization to help young artists find jobs in the art world instead of working at a hardware store. This quickly became a production company, and yes, we hired only artists.

We ended up creating installations for Art Basel, curating art shows, developing sensorial events, we opened a bar in Wynwood, and even producing music videos and a documentary which I am still editing myself. On the other side, I had become a ‘ghost painter.’ Very much a ghostwriter, I was hired by several artists to create pieces in various media which sometimes were retouched but most times were simply signed and sold as they were under the artist’s name. I did very well working this way, and yes, in brief, I prostituted my hand.

When I graduated, I felt the need to change my life. See my art had grown into branches, and the strongest ones were a little too dark and too strong in concept for Miami. I needed a different niche, and before the winter in NY, comes the summer in LA, so, for now, this is home. This city has been incredibly welcoming, I quickly found my place and being a detached and lonely individual I find that this has the perfect combination of what I need to help my work continue growing.

Plus, it helps that I have found a group of people who believe in me and unknowingly helped me incredibly through my last depression. Some didn’t even know I was depressed, to begin with.

Has it been a smooth road?
Well, insecurities and not being sure which road to take were always the big challenge, but never too strong to stop me. The main issue has always been that I have worked and developed strong techniques in so many types of media, that it has almost been easier to work by consumer demand than it has been to create collections and sell them. I don’t like to toot my own horn, I don’t even own a horn, but I can recreate anything I’m asked to, in almost any media. It was a nightmare for a few years, like some sort of Midas touch curse. I still struggle with it.

I did discover something I am passionate about. In my time in school I heard a professor say that none of us will ever invent anything new, everything is already done, and we just mix things up and release new work based on the old. This tormented and one day, by accident, I developed a new media. Patents are pending, but I basically create a canvas out of wall paint, layer it several times until it reaches the consistency I want, and then either transfer an image to it, or paint on it directly.

These pieces can be any size I like, they can have imagery on front and back, and can be suspended from the ceiling to create wall divisions, curtains, or anything that a run can do and more. Plus they are incredibly durable and resistant. This expanded my photography practice, I always liked photo, but printing on paper never quite did it for me, I even feel bad charging for a photograph sometimes, but printing on a piece of paint is revolutionary.

Aside from that, I love painting in oils, watercolor, gouache, ink, charcoal, pencil, pastels, acrylics (although it’s my least favorite). That’s just 2D, I work 3D as well, also 1D (which I consider writing), but I’ll elaborate at a later time. Depression has probably been the biggest set back for a number of years. But I do have to admit, that the day I accepted my depression changed my life. I read everything I could about it, and I had some experience within my own family but was never a supporter of medicines to alleviate its strength.

Instead, I resorted to meditation, breathing exercises, reading, writing, playing music, and all sorts of things to try and get rid of it, with no permanent success. One day, working on a series of seven paintings for a final in school, I was into Buddhism at the time but had been raised Catholic, then Protestant, then I kinda kept going on my own. But I digress.

I realized that the entity we call “the Devil” is nothing more than our own selves being judged by a separation of good and bad, that the more we hide from it and try and escape it by pushing it away, the less we understand and the more we speculate. I am not one to speculate, so I decided to turn my piece in a vision of the Devil seen through the Chakras. See, its all about lightness, fullness, and clarity, but where is the balance if we don’t embrace the darkness within us?

I decided to depict in these pieces seven women, with different animal faces, different instruments and name each piece with the line of a poem I wrote. All elements made sense and were studied carefully to connect the piece to a mirror of what the chakra is, I was looking at the blackness within each of the seven colors. You can see the poem and the pieces on my website, under “paint on paint,” then “Which ‘s d’ Devil.”

This moment woke me up so much that I realized that my depression is fuel for my work, because all my work is commentary, regarding one issue or the other, I mess with religion, with myths, mysticism, nudity, I am basically a portrayer of taboo, and depression has become to me like a river I have learned to sail. It never goes away, and I don’t want it to. If I am feeling down, I take the time to conceptualize my next few projects.

If I am feeling good, I keep it close, and as I am creating, I sprinkle my depression like a topping on the piece. This not only liberates me because I am able to see it (much like when you say something and hear yourself and realize it’s not as bad as you thought). But more than liberate me, it encases a big chunk of my feelings, emotions, and ideas on my piece. I think I would not be able to put more of me on a work of art if I bled on it.

I don’t think I made it easier for myself, I think I taught myself to climb more assertively.

So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the PI – π story. Tell us more about the business.
As I mentioned before, the majority of my work is about women. Not the women we have created from the masculine point of view of our society, but instead backtracking to the very start, and placing her in an equal space, where we don’t have to fight for equality, but having had that duality throughout our whole existence.

Furthermore, I implement myths, legends, and stories where men have been heroes and swapping them for a woman. I often ask myself, “what if women had ruled the world instead of men? What if God had been a female?

Who would be our leaders, our heroes, the people we look up to? How would we dress today, would our architecture still be square? What would we wear? Would we even wear anything? What language would we speak? Politics? The answer will take a while to formulate, but I am willing to explore this until my last day.

Creating narratives where the female body is not idealized but real, nude, simple, with little enhancement, with little expectation of what we consider “beautiful” today. I try and place these characters in different circumstances where the story becomes more important than the subject, and where we are taking things less literal and more intuitive.

I love to see reactions and hear comments before I explain my concept, and then watch faces change when I explain what I am really doing. I little-putting obstacles in peoples linear minds. My high regard for the woman and my respect for them and the female in all of us is certainly a strong pillar of my work, and I have noticed it sets me apart, unfortunately. That means we have work to do, it means there are many who don’t.

Other aspects of my work play with notions we have built based on beliefs, ideals, and actions. I try and explore the psyche and bring my own interpretation of it, after all, that’s all I really have. My personal vision of a world divided.

That is also what sets me apart from others, my interpretation, and creativity. My technique, whether good or bad, can be copied, and even the pride of creating a new media could crumble down if in the future I find that someone else did it first. But that won’t stop me, I don’t think anything can.

So, what’s next? Any big plans?
There are big plans, I am currently working on a series of magical women from history transferred to a modern world, that will be a very strong collection. It’s quite exciting, to be honest. There are many ideas as for paintings, sculptures and other elements. I reinvest all my earnings to create more, so we will see how long it takes to create them all.

All I know is that photo productions are getting larger and larger, more complex and new elements are coming. These photos, which started as references for my paintings will continue on both planes, photo, and paint. There are also several other projects in the works.

A graphic novel, which I intend to script and film as a two-part feature. This will also be multiple novel collections, as there are already elements of future books being placed in the timeline of this universe. Several other short films are being conceptualized and being prepared for shooting.

As for music, it has been sleeping too long. I plan on completing an EP, which will be released as music videos first, tying a narrative or rise/fall together. Some new musical instrument designs as well, coming up in the next few years.

Perhaps a fashion and accessory line as well. I have had experience in the fashion and design field for the majority of my life, and I even created a strong career out of it to support my life as I was figuring everything else out.

I can’t really elaborate more on this, as I am too present to think of tomorrow, but I see my goals. I see the results ahead, but my time is not linear, and less and less I find myself subjected to a clock and a date, so keep your eyes open. Once I transcend time, I will take over space as well, and you will see me coming from all angles. The rest is history.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.paoloiarussi.com
• Phone: 786-294-1440
• Email: pi@poetryofi.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/icarussi

Image Credit:
Poetry Of I

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