The Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art of Prato is devoting a major exhibition to the intense, multifaceted work of the painter, sculptor, printmaker and illustrator Mimmo Paladino.
Based on an original project by the artist and the museum´s director Bruno Corà, the show traces the main cycles of Paladino´s work from 1977 up to now, through 80 of his most significant works, paintings, sculptures and installations, besides drawings, small bronze sculptures, illustrated books and documentaries.
Mimmo Paladino (b. 1948, Paduli, Benevento) is a prominent figure on today´s international art scene.
In the second half of the 70s Paladino rediscovered figuration and reclaimed colour, in terms both of its expressive value and its pigmentary materiality; his interest lay above all in the tendency of the figurative to become language and narration. He produced a succession of abstract and oneiric figurative forms interspersed with large, expressively-coloured canvases, headed by geometric structures, branches and masks that envelop the viewer in suggestive atmospheres.
Sculpture is a fundamental part of Paladino´s work, as demonstrated by a number of beautiful works in the show bronze and aluminium casts, pieces in wood (often painted), but also in copper, iron, steel and other materials. Despite their apparent fixity, Paladino´s works always preserve a densely-allusive intensity. The masks with no gaze and the archaic profiles of heads contain shades of meaning that elude a single interpretation, but appear rather to be resonant with allusions and deliberately unfathomable enigmas and mysteries.
In the second half of the 80s, Paladino´s works were based on a compositional practice that became gradually simpler. Colour was used to suggest the entire space of the work, while the inventory of signs became more limited just a few attributes sufficed to delineate the entire structure.
At the end of the 90s, Paladino produced a number of series of paintings in which the knottiest aspect of his work became evident, namely the constant questioning of the language of art. Some of the major threads of his work are geometry, fragmentation, the multiplicity and accumulation of signs, combined with sudden pauses and shifts in register.
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