Paolo Chiasera

Martina Simeti is pleased to announce Pollai Volanti & Glory Hole, a presentation of new works by Paolo Chiasera which will inaugurate the new Simeti Project Space.

SPS is a new project space jointly run by Archivio Turi Simeti and Galleria Martina Simeti. It will host initiatives by artists and designers active from 1960 onwards, marking the time Turi first undertook his own practice. Located at Via Seneca 4/6, the space will be viewable from the street at all times and open by appointment.

In a large studio inside an ancient abbey in northern France, Paolo Chiasera created a series of works on canvas in which the presence of the body and space become a dominant feature. The studio and the artist are two coordinates present in these large-format paintings that refer to a metaphysical stage that harks back to fifteenth-century Italian painting, yet in the three works in this exhibition, there is no trace of them. This absence plays on a biographical aspect of the artist himself, having retired some years ago in search of a new artistic vein that would provide a segue from the conceptual elaborations of his work over the past decades. Themes such as the elaboration process of the work, its metamorphoses and the invisible are always key to his production.

With these three canvases, Chiasera exhibits in Italy after a period of reflection and concentration, during which the artist made a further foray into painting. A synthesis of the works the artist created over recent decades, with a focus on the quality of his paint material. Looking at one of Chiasera’s paintings places the observer before a temporal dogma: one that links painting to its origins, to its development and diffusion.

[Excerpt from the text by Lorenzo Benedetti]