I Sogni / Dreams
2017
Sognare è Necessario
The Paper Airplane and the Dream That Never Lands
Close your eyes. You’re seven years old.
You’ve folded a sheet of paper — maybe torn from a notebook, maybe stolen from your father’s stack — with that absolute concentration only children possess. Every crease must be perfect. Every angle, exact. Because you know, with the kind of certainty that comes before any reasoning, that something enormous depends on that precision.
Then you throw it. And for a moment — that moment that lasts an entire lifetime — it flies.
The Surrealists understood this. Dalí knew it, Magritte knew it, anyone who ever dared to look inside a dream without running away knew it: the truest reality isn’t the one you can touch, but the one you can feel. That simple objects — a clock, an apple, a bird — can carry within them the weight of an entire invisible universe.
The paper airplane is one of those objects.
It isn’t a toy. It has never been just a toy. It is the first piece of architecture we build with our own hands — and the first thing we let go of. It is the discovery that something fragile, made of almost nothing, can defy gravity. That the impossible exists. That magic requires no formulas, no wands: only the right fold, a breath, and the courage to open your fingers.
For countless children of that generation, throwing a paper airplane was a cosmic act. For a few seconds of perfect glide, they were part of something larger — of flight, of infinity, of the dream in its purest and most physical form.
In the works of this cycle, those paper airplanes return. But the context has changed. They have grown, just as the artist has. Just as we have.
They appear in landscapes that do not belong to childhood — or perhaps belong to it more than any other place. They float in suspended spaces, cross boundaries between worlds, land on surfaces that should not be able to hold them. And right there, in that tension between the lightness of paper and the weight of everything it represents, the question that every dream carries opens up:
How far can what we imagine truly go?
The answer is not in the airplane’s trajectory. It is in the eye of the one watching it fly — and recognizing, in that white and silent flight, something they thought they had lost long ago.
Something that was still there. Waiting. Carefully folded, ready to be released again.
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