Rai5 premieres a documentary dedicated to Mimmo Paladino

Mimmo Paladino and the Transavanguardia are the protagonists of Art Night on Rai5 airing Friday, May 27 at 9:15 p.m. The host, Neri Marcorè, takes the audience to discover the portrait of one of the most prolific and multifaceted artists of international contemporaneity, namely Mimmo Paladino, with the TV premiere documentary Mimmo Paladino. The Language of Signs.

Written by Nunzio Massimo Nifosì and Layla Bartlett Parry, directed by Nunzio Massimo Nifosì and produced by Laboratorio, in association with Luce Cinecittà and in collaboration with Rai Cultura, the documentary recounts the “father” of an eclectic and multilingual art, which ranges from painting to sculpture, cinema to theater, graphic work to photography. Paladino practices what Achille Bonito Oliva has called cultural nomadism, or the freedom proper to those artists who move incessantly from one stylistic territory to another. With the publication in 1980 of Bonito Oliva’s La Transavanguardia Italiana, Paladino is included among those artists who, in response to movements such as Minimal and Conceptual Art, pick up the paintbrush again and mark a return to traditional art forms.

His numerous trips to South America led him to take an interest in the local culture permeated by a primitive animism whose echoes are carried by his painting, and in the course of his career he experimented with the most disparate techniques, from engraving to collage, from mosaic to encaustic: the constant element is a fantastic and metaphorical imagery, rich in allegorical figures, geometric signs, archaic sacredness, masks, skulls, and animals. Mimmo Paladino thus confirms himself as one of the most internationally recognized contemporary artists, precisely because his sign speaks a language common to all, because the symbol is “the splinter that holds the soul of every creation.” In addition to the artist’s first-person account, the film also features important testimonies: from Mario Martone to Michelangelo Pistoletto to Germano Celant in one of the last interviews he gave before his death.

Next, Art Night features the Teche Rai documentary Il gioco delle mura by Nico Garrone, dedicated to the 1982 exhibition Avanguardia Transavanguardia 1968-1977, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva. To ’68, the moment of maximum mobilization of art and culture, corresponds the Avant-Garde; the decade that follows, up to ’77, brings out a profound crisis of models and values that leads to a new model of cultural behavior, what Bonito Oliva christens precisely Transavanguardia.

Art Night, hosted by Neri Marcorè, is a program by Silvia De Felice and Emanuela Avallone, Massimo Favia, Alessandro Rossi, with direction by Andrea Montemaggiori.

Pictured: Mimmo Paladino. Photo by Lorenzo Palmieri

Rai5 premieres a documentary dedicated to Mimmo Paladino

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