Mimmo Paladino

The Greenberg Gallery, Saint Louis

James Corcoran Gallery, Santa Monica

Paladino

The mystery and beauty of Mimmo Paladino’ s work lies in his subtle assimilation of a rich history of myth transformed into a contemporary art form.

Born in Paduli, a small town in the South of Italy, the artist was surrounded by history and layers of past civilizations. This contact with the ancient past brought "not only ancient warriors and demons and early medieval angels in mythological motivated scenes, but intriguing indefinable small objects which enhance the texture of the works, eager to break out of the fiction they inhabit and take their place in our world, signalling emotional events." (Donald B. Kuspit, Mimmo Paladino at Sperone Westwater, in "Art in America", Feb 1984, p. 146)

One of the most important representatives of the Transavanguardia movement, which represented in Italy at the beginning of the 1980s a return to painting, Paladino is strongly interested in memory and past references. The rediscovery of a profound, metaphysical memory, turns forms into archetypal images outside time and space, alluding to a primitive universe.

Camera in Passione, executed in 1986, is populated by forms recalling arcane figures and ghostly masks which are strategically placed across the canvas, challenging the viewer to confront and attempt to understand their own desires and fears. The painting is a meditation on an unknown past, in which the artist raises spiritual questions that remain unanswered. The masks with no gaze and the archaic profiles of heads contain shades of meaning that elude a single interpretation. On the contrary, they appear rather to be resonant with allusions and deliberately unfathomable enigmas and mysteries.