Mimmo Paladino
1948, Paduli (BN), Italy
A central figure in Italian contemporary art, Mimmo Paladino is among the founders of the Transavanguardia movement, which in the 1980s brought figurative painting and the recovery of iconic memory back to the centre of art. His practice extends from drawing to painting, from sculpture to installation, building a symbolic universe dense with archaic, mythological and spiritual references.
Born in Campania, like Stefano Rastrelli, Paladino shares with him a deep love for Naples, a city that has often inspired his work. Primary forms, totemic figures, intense colours and layered signs make each of his works a place of passage between past and present, between vision and narrative.
Mimmo Paladino
K 467 2019
140x160 cm
In this painting, Paladino builds a visual mosaic made of enigmatic symbols, musical quotations (the title recalls a Mozart sonata), masks and silhouettes. The fiery red background, recalling his passage through conceptual art, vibrates like an archaeological wall on which the artist inscribes fragments of memory, poetic suggestions, recurring icons. The stylised heads and pure forms engage in dialogue with pictorial quotations and raw materials, in a balance between abstraction and narrative that characterises his entire body of work.
Mimmo Paladino
Testimone 2017
Patinated bronze, 67×196×46 cm
Testimone is a powerful, silent sculpture: a hieratic, compact, almost stone-like figure embracing the head of a horse. The patinated bronze suggests the density of lava or volcanic rock, evoking the archaic, mythic force of Mediterranean sculpture. The relationship between man and animal, a recurring trait in his iconography, here becomes an empathetic, timeless bond, charged with a sense of protection and sacredness. A presence that asserts itself as a symbolic guardian of time and memory.
OTHER WORKS BY
Mimmo Paladino
Mimmo Paladino
L’eredita’ di Leonardo
2019
70x50 cm