Pier Paolo Calzolari Untitled

cm 140 x 100 (tavola)

After spending his childhood in Venice, Pier Paolo Calzolari made his debut in 1965 with an exhibition of paintings in Bologna, the city where he had been born. In 1967 he contributed to the show that marked the beginning of Arte Povera (Galleria La Bertesca, Genoa), and from then on, though he never entirely abandoned painting (on canvas or board), he increasingly began to use different materials, with a preference for “alive” ones, malleable and mutable over time, such as moss, tobacco leaves, ice, wax, and salt. This was in keeping with a direct and absolute poetics of the sublime that distinguished the artist’s work from the outset. It was precisely these qualities that prompted Harald Szeemann to invite the artist to take part in the exhibition “When Attitude becomes Form” at the Kunsthalle of Berne in 1969. The event marked a turning point in international art, with a move towards “unconventional” materials and an emphasis on the attitude and the idea. In the same years, between 1967 and 1970, Calzolari produced a group of works, including "Untitled", which represent his poetics of the sublimem very well. They are allegorical in nature, consisting of everyday, natural materials that suggest other and more profound relationships with time, culture, and history. In these pieces, Calzolari succeeded in fusing together poetry and the everyday, while still retaining a sense of the pictorial, often involving, besides sight, smell and hearing as well. His purpose, as the critic Bruno Corà has observed, was to render otherwise unobservable qualities of feeling physical and almost tangible, and to create for the viewer a real and “pungent” experience, a space of transformation and of encounter with himself and with nature, a goal the artist has stuck to in more recent works as well.

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I. Gianelli (ed.), Pier Paolo Calzolari, exhibition catalogue (Rivoli, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea), Milan 1994. B. Corà (ed.), Pier Paolo Calzolari, exhibition catalogue (Bologna, Galleria d’arte moderna), Turin 1999. Pier Paolo Calzolari, exhibition catalogue (Venice, Ca’ Pesaro – Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna), Pistoia 2011.

Foto Roberto Galasso

Donation by Claudia Gian Ferrari

Installation