A single event, organized in two venues, which tells, through more than twenty paintings and sculptures together with some famous installations, the genesis and the most significant passages of the creative story of one of the most important contemporary Italian artists.
The exhibition itinerary, organized into seven thematic sections, starts from Milan, where the initiatory works of a young Paladino are collected, who in the seventies turned to painting to define his own identity.
Then, in Pero, in the largest of the six rooms, the large installation presented at the 28 Venice Biennale is reconstructed for the first time in 1988 years. It is the work that becomes the fulcrum around which the adventure of a mature and self-aware artist. It is precisely on this occasion that Paladino proves that he has known how to rework and extend his work with the most varied signs, colors and materials, going beyond the surface of the walls.
The exhibition retraces some of the typical themes of the Campanian artist's expressive figure, from the geometries that analyze space and redesign it, to the sculpture that is a reflection on the archetypal elements of shape and volume, up to the room of large paintings with primary colors, yellows, red, white and black.
The gold room, one of the founding elements of Paladino's language, between the yellow light and the black and white tones that punctuate its surface, acts as a luminous counterpoint to the great work of burnt wood between broken limbs and black figures consumed by fire.
Paladino's work manifests itself in all its complexity, revealing his conceptual and analytical training, an essential element of a never casual pictorial work, which ranges between traditional and avant-garde instances and draws from archaic and non-European cultures.
The salient images of Paladino's career reveal how many of his works, already from the first paintings crossed by branches and wood or flanked by three-dimensional elements, present themselves as real installations.
All this reveals how his subjects are never simply figurative. The images, in fact, often arise from the stratification of signs and materials, which create tangles and fragments, declaring, hiding, or only alluding to a meaning.
In his works we read the emergence of an archaic and Mediterranean culture, to the point that the language of art and the artist's practice with Paladino seem to be something magical or shamanic, the place of a ritual or a tragedy. His works, despite being figurative and symbolic, evoke meanings and contents without ever revealing their origin, but only expressing their shadow, mask or archetypal trace.
