Paolo Baratella - Under the Arches

In the history of art, a clear distinction can often be made between figurative and abstract stylistic movements. However, when an artist's goal is to depict an object that resonates with phenomenal reality but is also charged with hidden and symbolic meaning, this boundary can become blurred. Symbolism and Expressionism are emblematic stylistic movements in their conceptual interpretation of reality, with an iconic rendering of images and a symbolic interpretation in the use of color. In Paolo Baratella's paintings, abstract and figurative blend almost seamlessly. This painter's favorite subjects are highly refined, deriving from a citationism that draws on images from the past, but everything is transfigured into an extremely experimental language, always striving for strong expressiveness.

The images recovered by Paolo Baratella are constantly subjected to a process of expressionist dirtiness. In this case, the Babel-like overlapping of the arches is produced almost in negative, and its form is extracted through a frenetic pictorial gesture of splashes of color. The image cited by Baratella is thus completely recontextualized, also through the use of color, which creates a uniform surface of red, one of the artist's favorite hues.

Paolo Baratella was born in Bologna in 1935. He began his exhibition career in Milan in the early 1960s, and continued in many other Italian and European cities, such as Bonn, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, ​​Basel, Helsinki, Brussels, Moscow, as well as New York, San Francisco, Toronto, and Montreal. There are numerous exhibitions in Italy, such as Salvare Venezia at the Venice Biennale in 1972, the Milan Biennale in 1974 and 1994, the Rome Quadrennial in 1986 and 1999 and the Milan Triennale in 1992. There are also many solo exhibitions dedicated to his work, among which we remember the exhibitions at the Mudima in Milan and at the Civic Galleries of Modern and Contemporary Art in Ferrara in 1995, at the Palazzo Reale in Milan in 1998, at the Zona Servizi Territoriali exhibition area in Castelfranco Veneto, at the Galleria Soave in Alessandria in 2002 and at Palazzo Guasco in Alessandria in 2003.

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