PAOLO PALAZZOLI

“Fra tradizione e innovazione” Volume VI

Filed to Library Thomas J. Watson  
Metropolitan Museum,  New York, NY, USA

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It would be improper and undue to define Paolo Palazzoli's painting as dryly postmodern, in whose creative sensitivity significant figurative instances are concentrated that escape the derivative logics that properly belong to the postmodern climate, to recall, rather, content densities of high moral depth.

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On the level of the mere empirical emergence of a syntactic notation of the arrangement of Palazzoli's creative imagination in a figurative construction clearly available to the transfiguration of reality in phantasmatic longing, we cannot fail to recognize that a sort of critical approach to the logic of a creativity that rediscovers the "values" of painting as such, is reasonably evocable. And all this, evidently, on the condition of calling into question the significance of a dispositive gesture that knows how to put in a consequential and semantically convincing line the logical and proactive arsenal of a symbolic deliberation fully aware of its own opportunities and willing to expend itself on the terrain of a figuration rich in ideas of great psychological and emotional suggestion.

One almost gets the impression, at times, that the artist does not intend to let the fullness of his figurative skills emerge which are certainly of great depth, preferring to let a sort of definitive impertinence spread over his images which almost evokes the atmospheres of a sensibility that we would define as "post-clarist", I mean, with this name, to critically highlight the perimeter of a further segment to be placed alongside those of Anachronism, Citationism, Neo-Mannerism and Transavantgarde itself, the Neuen Wilden and the New-New, which are all variations on the theme of the broader postmodern climate.

What is particularly convincing in Palazzoli's painting is his availability for meticulous and productive investigation of the data, an undertaking to which he seems to approach himself with great sensitivity and respect for things: for those things of which he knows how to give the user a 'apparently alchemical image, almost from the past and, instead, only apparently commensurable with the archetypes, for example, Art Nouveau, and, in reality', belonging to the dynamics of a figuration fully aware of the achievements and results of all that creative practice of a figurative nature which inaugurated a season of great importance, for example, in the 60s, with the research of "Realism of denunciation" and with the specific action, for example, of groups such as Equino Cronica or other individual personalities .

Works such as "Foresight", for example, are proposed as paradigmatic of a figurative consistency which seems to want to overflow into the symbolic order and which, instead, attest exactly the opposite: that is, the artist's determination to provide a symbolic charge to the own image, contributing to making the message full of meaningful testimonies of humanity.

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And, if other examples were needed, it would be appropriate to invoke the "Jesus Christ in Glory" of the Central Altar of the Church of the Lucignano Cemetery, in the province of Arezzo, where our pictorial sensitivity reaches results of extreme delicacy formal, obtaining objective results of figurative rendering which place his painting in a sort of timeless sphere, certainly mystical, but not for this reason historically absent, the same sphere in which the painting of Angelico, so profoundly ascetic and also so profoundly attentive to the dynamics of modernity, which, in her time, marked the transition from the "perspectiva medievalis" to the properly "artificialis" of new compositional research.

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Prof. Rosario Pinto,  Critico E Storico D'Arte/Art Critic

Prof. na Escola Superior Saude Santarem

Escola Superior Saude Santarem

Santarém, Portugal