Padua, Mimmo Paladino's drawings dedicated to Punchinello on display at Civic Museums

Thirty years after the exhibition of the cycle of 104 Punchinello drawings by Mimmo Paladino (Paduli, 1948), inspired by number and subject matter by Giandomenico Tiepolo’s masterpiece, the Divertimenti per li regazzi, the Civic Museums of Padua are celebrating one of the great masters of the 20th century by presenting the entire corpus of restored drawings in an exhibition from January 21 to April 10, 2023 at the Museo degli Eremitani. Curated by Flavio Arensi and Stefano Annibaletto, entirely produced by the Civic Museums, with the collaboration of Studio Paladino and its Archive, the exhibition Mimmo Paladino. Pulcinella presents the entire corpus of 104 recently restored drawings of Pulcinella, inspired by number and subject by Tiepolo’s masterpiece.

In 1992 Mimmo Paladino created the 104 drawings of Pulcinella inspired by the album Divertimento per li regazzi, in which Giandomenico Tiepolo, retired to his villa in Zianigo in the last years of his life, illustrates the adventures, death and resurrection of Pulcinella. The importance of this portfolio, which has never had a commission, is not only to represent, in Paladino’s complex artistic journey, the first articulated project of storytelling in images, in some ways a kind of storyboard for a film, as much as to identify a moment of great critical attention for drawing, particularly on the international stage.

Paladino’s 104 Punchinellos were in fact the protagonists in 1992 of an exhibition, curated along with the now rare volume by Michele Bonuomo, hosted by Palazzo Liberty in Turin, then by the Albertina in Vienna (1993), and by the Kunsthal in Rotterdam (1994). In the same year, the Galleria civica in Trento delved into the theme of drawing with an extensive retrospective that ran from his beginnings to his most recent works. Paladino’s drawing had already had its international consecration with the exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel in 1981, organized by Dieter Koepplin, of more than two hundred works executed since the 1970s in which, according to critics, no “genre” limits can be identified. Tiepolo served Paladino as a pretext to tell the story of Punchinello, as a universal mask, but also as a reflection on the history of art, and on the possibility of not seeking caesuras with the past but rather opening up to any expressive opportunity.

“Tiepolo draws as the reality and painting he had known dissolve around him, between the end of the Venetian Republic and his death,” writes Stefano Annibaletto in his text in the catalog. “In his papers, in pen and ink, popular prints and quotations from his own and his father Giambattista’s paintings mingle, in a succession of articulate and rich narrative situations that Paladino purifies, in a lunge on the loneliness of the mask that becomes both icon of itself and alter ego of the artist.”

The Padua initiative is also an opportunity to republish the entire corpus of plates in a volume published by Skira. For Andrea Colasio, Culture Councillor of the City of Padua, the exhibition “is a confirmation of an increasingly punctual attention to contemporary art, for a city that guards Giotto’s masterpiece and is the capital of the 14th-century fresco, but that has seen in its history a figurative continuity that has been renewed over the centuries, up to the 20th century.”

The Civic Museums of Padua complex includes, in addition to the Eremitani Museum with its archaeological collections and picture gallery, the Palazzo Zuckermann museum with its applied arts and numismatic collections, and the Scrovegni Chapel inscribed in 2021 by UNESCO on the World Heritage List along with seven other city monuments that hold 14th-century fresco cycles.

The exhibition opens Tuesday through Sunday from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Open at Easter and Easter Monday. Admission with the ticket of the Civic Museums of Padua. For information see the museums website.

Padua, Mimmo Paladino's drawings dedicated to Punchinello on display at Civic Museums

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