Pier Paolo Calzolari. La terre est bleue comme une orange

Pier Paolo Calzolari. La terre est bleue comme une orange is the artist's third exhibition at Galleria Mazzoli after the 1979 and 1981 shows. On this occasion 14 paintings of various sizes and 4 drawings will be exhibited. All the works are of recent creation.
Accompanying the exhibition will be a limited edition catalog of 300 numbered copies with an essay by Richard Milazzo, The Silent Circus: The Illicit and Inept Rhapsodies of Pier Paolo Calzolari.
In the essay, the American critic, no friend of Conceptual Art or Minimalism, describes Calzolari's work as follows: "Although somewhat more lenient when it comes to the European iterations of the modalities of Minimalism and Conceptualism, better known as Arte Povera in Italy, as opposed to what can be called the corporate version of these movements in the U.S., what is at the heart of the conflation of these two modalities in Pier Paolo Calzolari's work is the ancient act of poiesis.
The difference between the two cultures is the rampant rational and ideological belief in materials for materials' sake, which often amounts to a form of materialism in the U.S, despite the rhetoric of 'dematerialization'; whereas Calzolari, not unaware of the politics of his time, especially during the 1960s and '70s, has dialectically suspended that belief, in behalf of a blind faith, an existential 'blindness' (that is the artist's own word), not just in materials, but in sculpture, in the exquisite hybrid constellations of the materials animating his installations over the years, and, most controversially, in paintings that have found themselves both inside and outside these parameters, often turning the paintings themselves, as in this show, into their own kinds of installations.
What obtains in Calzolari's practice are the 'post-installation' parameters of painting as a viable form of art, proclamation-free and yet categorically subversive – which is to say, his paintings are more intimate than our expectations would allow, but never less outré, even louche, and self-exiled, where his art expresses ultimately an inapposable and unappeasable reality.
[...] Pier Paolo Calzolari has always sought the radical quietude of the sideshow or what I am calling here the 'Silent Circus' of art reaching beyond itself, or what the artist has called the poetry of the 'suspended song.' When he has been compelled to enter the three-ring circus of several Documentas, Venice Biennales, and gallery shows, he has always done so as a trapeze artist hurling himself across the space-time continuum without a safety net. Risking all in behalf of the poetry of art, the art of making art, a tautological form of creative ecstasy, release, or freedom.
Perhaps the artist himself put it best, as early as the late 1960s, nearly a half century ago, especially in relation to the odd man out, namely painting, in terms of so-called avant-guard practice, avant-guardism often itself academic and reactionary in nature: 'If one negates painting when it is still alive, one does so out of desire for something that burns still more than painting, something that touches 'feelings,' impossibility and emotion itself.' And that something is art, unshackled, untoward, even unseemly, and often taking the formless, illicit, inept, and rapturous reality of the soul bursting beyond itself into forms of poetry we shall never be able to reduce, not even to words and not even to the sacred (or should we say sanctimonious) materialism of art".

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Pier Paolo Calzolari was born in 1943 in Bologna.
Spent his childhood and adolescence in Venice, whose artistic and aesthetic heritage left a deep mark on the future artist's sensibility. In 1965 he made his first painting works; in 1966-1967 he created the first of his works-performances, "The Filter and Welcome to the Angel," which involved viewers and which Calzolari himself calls an "activation of space." Between 1967 and 1972 he moved and worked between Paris, New York and Berlin and in these same years was included in the Arte Povera movement. Since 1967 he has been using objects and materials (fire, ice, lead, tin, salt, moss, tobacco) that know a second life alongside luminous elements (such as neon). Beginning in 1972, he focused on the study of an unconventional painting by juxtaposing pictorial signs with real objects, bringing the ritual of everyday life on the plane of aesthetic experience and in horizontal relationship with the world and history, while trying to maintain a connection with people's physical involvement. His path is characterized by several distinctive elements: the desire for saturation of the senses, how to make visible and the essence of things, and the attention paid to the fragility of objects and materials.
He lives and works in Lisbon.