Mimmo Paladino on show in Pietrasanta

(ANSA) - Rome, July 16 - Mimmo Paladino arrives in Pietrasanta in the Tuscan province of Lucca with an exhibition in the new spaces of the Galleria Giovanni Bonelli from July 29 to September 10. 'Mimmo Paladino. Opere scelte' (Selected works) presents a selection of recent works on cardboard using mixed techniques by the painter, sculptor and printmaker from the southern Campania region - one of the leading exponents of the Transavanguardia movement founded by Achille Bonito Oliva in 1980 - to give an overview of his distinctive style and poetics. The exhibition shows how symbolism and mystery continue to prevail in Paladino's work, where they are transfigured into fragments of geometrical shapes, heads and hands, houses, numbers, stars and vases, in compositions where the fusion of space and time evokes a primitive and arcane universe, but depicted in a contemporary style. The artist has created a pictorial alphabet rooted in the Mediterranean culture, but which also draws on the extraordinary figurative tradition of 14th- and 15th-century Italian art, from Paolo Uccello to Piero della Francesca and Leonardo da Vinci, and on to the philosophical references of Renaissance Neoplatonism.
    The 15 artworks on show in Pietrasanta present Paladino's production in all its complexity, appearing as a place of ritual or tragedy. They evoke meanings and content whose origin is however never disclosed, since the artist manages to convey only the shadow, mask or archetypal trace.