"For the past five years I have been engaged in a quixotic process cataloging the artifacts of a material world in decline. My archive—personal, often diaristic—tracks the efforts people make to repair and adorn their surroundings. The photographs fall into different series—"Hands," Wood," "Cars," "Asphalt" etc.—which are distinct in form but emanate from a consistent observational logic."
—PORTFOLIO: Paola Ferrario, BOMB magazine, Summer 2013
Rick Wester says he looks for artists who "expand the lexicon of photography" and say something in an original way. "I need to see people who are inventing things, and I think that's what Paola does," he says. He explains that he saw in her work astute cultural observation combined with a "superlative" artistic voice "that's itinerant, worldly, even-handed, nonjudgmental..."
— David Walker, PDN, July 2013
"Can a photograph be a poem? There are essential aspects of Paola Ferrario's work that remind me very strongly of the poetry of William Carlos Williams. She shares with the author of "The Red Wheelbarrow" a knack for isolating details of the world to highlight both their shabbiness and their beauty."
— Exhibition Review by Raphael Rubinstein, Art in America, March 2013
"Even if the color photographs in Ferrario's show weren't unframed and pinned directly to the walls, they'd still feel provisional. They're like quick notes made in passing, remarks on built-and often deteriorating-environments. Ferrario isn't the only photographer paying attention to this abject subject, but she is one of the wittiest and most voracious."
—The New Yorker, December 13 - January 12, 2012
"The Day Before the Parade, Paola Ferrario’s new series of photographs documenting a small town St. Patrick’s Day parade, is a nimble reclamation of the man in the crowd, or at least his folding chair. [...] These pictures visualize displacement via the simultaneous encroachment between the private and public realms. Similarly, spontaneity, and with that the individual, pushes against mass ornament. Who would have thought that the simple act of sitting requires this many types of chairs. Both of these arguments can be played out ontologically–what is a parade, and does it belong to a childhood memory, or to a dominant ideology? Or, they can be treated as photographs."
— “Paola Ferrario The Day Before The Parade” by Hunter Braithwaite, There Is No There Blog, February 2012
"In her first New York solo exhibition, "lmprevisti/Unforeseen," Italian-born photographer Paola Ferrario, fascinated by details of commonplace surfaces (walls, pavements) and humble objects (a bush strung with Christmas lights, a lost mitten, sunbathers' legs), revealed a spare style of considerable flexibility."
— Exhibition Review by Ben Lifson, Art in America, February 2010
"Like so many contemporary photographers, Ferrario sees the world glancingly and in fragments. The unframed color pictures here focus solely on bits of environments: graffiti, torn posters, cartoon stickers, a plastic bag wedged in the crack between concrete blocks..."
— “Goings On About Town: Art,” by Vince Aletti, The New Yorker, December 2009
"Paola Ferrario's images, casually mounted onto the wall, dissolve the formality of the photograph as an object through a combination of factors: their frameless presentation; their emphasis on overlooked moments; and their seemingly disposable nature, not unlike the graffiti they sometimes depict."
— “Paola Ferrario: Imprevisti/Unforeseen,” by T.J. Carlin, Time Out New York, December 2009