Mimmo Paladino and Piero della Francesca in dialogue in Arezzo

A contemporary artist meets one of his past painters whom he considers among his masters: this is the meaning of La regola di Piero the major solo exhibition that, in Arezzo at various venues from June 15, 2019 to January 31, 2020, presents Mimmo Paladino ’s homage to Piero della Francesca.

Paladino’s art is rooted in the great Italian figurative and philosophical tradition. A passion that has often led him to rediscover the most diverse cultures, in search of a confrontation with the archetypes, iconic matrices, and founding traditions that, from pre-Roman civilizations to the Renaissance, have dotted Mediterranean thought.

The Arezzo exhibition, commissioned by the Fondazione Guido d’Arezzo and the Municipality of Arezzo and curated by Luigi Maria Di Corato, delves into the relationship between Paladino and one of the figures from the past who counted most in his formation and with whom he has maintained a constant dialogue throughout his artistic research: Piero della Francesca.

A relationship summed up by the title of the exhibition, Piero’s Rule, which confirms how crucial the painter and mathematician from Sansepolcro was as a source of inspiration not only on an aesthetic level, but also on a methodological and theoretical one. A tribute that is meant to be graceful and that, while unfolding and unraveling throughout the city, never directly calls the Master into question on a formal level, but resolves to manifest a sharing of values, such as the encounter between tradition and modernity, between rationality and emotion, between light, form and color, between idealization, abstraction, symbol and reality.

More than 50 of Paladino’s works are exhibited in a traveling itinerary that touches six different exhibition venues. The two central nuclei of the exhibition (which features painting itself and presents three-dimensional works in their natural pictorial vocation) are the Municipal Gallery of Contemporary Art, which returns to offer great masterpieces to the public, and the Medici Fortress, a recent venue for art exhibitions.

The Gallery will welcome a selection of thirty-four paintings including such celebrated works as Suonno. By Piero della Francesca from 1983 and as many as two works from the series The Principle of Perspective from 1999, or the unpublished “polyptych” of eighteen elements entitled Santi, made from 2016 to 2018, and representing a kind of summa of Paladino’s thinking around painting; six core sculptures titled Architecture made in various materials from 2000 to 2002; and, among the installations, the very recent Untitled of 2018, composed of bronze, water and a magnificent video tracing Paladino’s engagement with film, exhibited only in Naples in December 2018.

A large votive “obelisk” will stand in the square in front of the Gallery overlooked by the Basilica of St. Francis (which preserves the Stories of the True Cross in the Main Chapel). The work, more than twenty meters high, is inspired by the Gigli di Nola (shoulder-mounted processional machines, now a UNESCO heritage site) and consists of numbers assembled together: a “temporary monument” to mathematics, but also to Humanism’s proto-scientific vocation for the pursuit of exactitude, of which Piero’s treatises are a famous manifesto.

A core of monumental works capable of triggering an uncommon dramatic tension with the rough nature of the spaces have been selected for the Fortezza. The itinerary begins, again, with a work from the 1980s: it is Untitled a 1988 bronze chariot carrying twenty heads, precious trophies of an apotropaic procession leading inside the fortification. Among the other monumental sculpture-paintings presented are the nine elements of Vento d’acqua, also in bronze, from 2005 already exhibited at the Capodimonte Museum in Naples, and the gigantic Specchi ustori made in 2017 just for the 2017 Brescian exhibition.

Three other milestones complete the itinerary. The installation entitled Dormienti, among Paladino’s best-known and best-loved works, made with Brian Eno in 1999 for London’s Roundhouse and here repurposed in a new setting in the deconsecrated church of Sant’Ignazio. The large gold leaf cross Untitled from 2016, a respectful homage to Cimabue ’s early masterpiece in the church of San Domenico. The installation at Porta Stufi where the eighteen polychrome banners placed on the walls, Flags of 2003 in aluminum, seem to signal an ancient trophy left on the pavement: this is Elmo, one of the artist’s best-known works, a 1998 bronze, exhibited in major museums around the world, which here, unembarrassed, greets arriving or departing visitors, recalling the splendors of a not-yet-distant past.

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Source: press release

Mimmo Paladino and Piero della Francesca in dialogue in Arezzo

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