In Arezzo, the master of the Transavanguardia pays homage to the great lesson of Piero della Francesca

Among the contemporary “nomadists”, Mimmo Paladino is without doubt one of those who knew perfectly well where to go. The reference is to his postmodernist derivation, when, with the overcoming of the concept of the avant-garde, one was suddenly free to wander through the history of art with no obligation to adhere to styles or languages. It was the time of “intellectual nomadism” and of the Transavanguardia; but while the movement founded by Bonito Oliva has by now been discussed all too much, the same cannot be said of the cue offered by Paladino through the solo exhibition currently running in Arezzo until 31 January 2020 (Curated by Luigi Maria Di Corato. Arezzo: Medici Fortress, Municipal Gallery of Contemporary Art, former Church of Sant’Ignazio, Basilica of San Francesco, Church of San Domenico, Porta Stufi).

The title is emblematic: La regola di Piero, and this offers the occasion to reflect on the theme of the relationship between present and past, not only by virtue of his work, but more generally in relation to a dialectical confrontation in which, in our own day, many artists have been engaged. Paladino’s work is born of the great Italian figurative tradition, looking to the profound principles of intimate semantic relations between alchemical echoes and mathematical foundations. His culture is that of the Renaissance masters, and among these Piero della Francesca stands without doubt at the summit. Hence the Arezzo exhibition, in the lands of Piero, in that non-Florentine Tuscany which would nonetheless furnish the city of the Medici with all the ingredients necessary to generate the Renaissance.

Paladino, a Campanian from Paduli in the province of Benevento, thus breathes the wind of a culture that forged strong ties with the rule of mathematics, once the preserve of that Leonardo Fibonacci, the Pisan friar, discoverer of the famous numerical sequence capable of explaining with refined elegance the universal dynamic and, with it, of reaching the foundation of the golden geometry. Alongside them stand the extraordinary undertakings of Luca Pacioli (a native of Arezzo itself) and Leonardo da Vinci, accomplices, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, in that De Divina Proportione, still today a starting point for any careful examination of the relationship between art and mathematics.

The Tuscany encountered by Paladino is therefore that of the most rigorous formal order, where everything is subject to inescapable rules and in which the human being lives the junction between outside and inside through the perfection of sacred geometry. The artist’s homage is nonetheless immune to any simplistic complacency toward such masters, turning rather to a mournful and silent poetic dimension. One even senses a magic realism in the manner of Donghi, were it not that in this exponent of the Transavanguardia realism recedes in favour of metaphysics, returning somewhat to meditate on the silent form of the mannequin as a modern sculpture that stands proudly in shop windows but which, the moment it is abstracted from its commercial context, dons exclusively the guise of a courteous witness to frenetic times.

Paladino, then, does not directly evoke Piero, does not take up his forms; rather he interprets his essence, engaging at close quarters with the poetry of light as of form, of colour, of the symbol. Reason and emotion alternate across the 50 works on display in an itinerant route unwound through six different exhibition venues, giving the artist the chance to express himself according to his own, natural gifts as a narrator of the uncertain. It is characteristic of the latter to cross genres with nonchalance, and this involves not only painting and sculpture, and with them drawing or engraving, but also theatre and cinema, as recently demonstrated by his Quijote, a film inspired by Cervantes’ novel, of which he was not only set designer but also director.

Thus is revealed the artist’s inclination toward the overcoming of form in the acquisition of space. The “rule of Piero” interpreted as the artistic condition whereby every form must necessarily relate to the space in which it comes to interact. Alberto Burri had understood this perfectly, for throughout the whole arc of his career he invoked similar principles, playing with formless and worn materials yet inserting them systematically within rigid geometric cages. As did, more recently, Ettore Spalletti, whose “rooms” insist continually on the definition of a mental space even before a physical one, and where even the limit of the particular becomes the imperceptible and intimate element upon which to found one’s own feeling and one’s own being.

Space as psychological experience and, for this reason, far removed from the temptation of colour. It is on these references that Paladino’s work insists, finding in Arezzo the courage to measure itself against the challenge of thought. Almost a contradiction for one who is the child of an age responsible for the spread of “weak thought”. And yet, for example, before the Dormienti, one of his most celebrated and beloved works, created with Brian Eno in 1999 for the Roundhouse in London and here presented afresh in a new installation in the deconsecrated church of Sant’Ignazio, one perceives precisely that dimension of reflection capable of suggesting a parallel with the beginning of the twentieth century, when the contemplative stasis of a De Chirico stood opposed to the exuberant dynamism of a Boccioni. This should prompt reflection on the meaning of a research woven along the thread of meditation, where the recall of the past preserves that “poetics of necessity”, manifested not as a disquieting advance toward the new, but as an admonition in the present for a programmatic existential serenity.

What this means, to attempt a simplification, is told by the present time, by the daily fear of a self-destructive progress and by the need that certain artists express to return to the season of rigour. The Rule of Piero is therefore a moral fact, even before an artistic one: the taking up again of the great masters upon whom we have founded our present. Not the solution to our problems, but at least the indication of a possible road.

The signs that Paladino leaves in Arezzo thus induce such an awakening of awareness. This is how we interpret another very famous work: Elmo, a bronze sculpture of 1998, already exhibited in the world’s major museums, which welcomes us on arrival, as on departure, reminding us of a past not too distant, one of which we are called to become aware as a treasure for the present.

Andrea Baffoni graduated in the Humanities, with a specialisation in art history, and earned his research doctorate at the University of Perugia. A curator of exhibitions and a journalist, he has published numerous essays and articles on Futurism and on the avant-gardes of the second half of the twentieth century.