Mimmo Paladino – Untitled

This artist emerged in 1977 in Naples with a large pastel mural in Lucio Amelio’s Gallery. This work was the first signal of the new pictorial figuration which in those years became the new trend of contemporary art around the world, Transavanguardia, which made its debut at the Venice Biennial in 1980. Images which return to an arcane and primitive universe
where the forms are translated into elegant and simplifies signs return again and again in Mimmo Paladino’s artistic quest. Allegorical figures live in a world in which living and dead people, skulls and skeletons, the characteristic expressionless masks and animals all live. The same forms progressively free themselves from the initial support to live autonomously in a three-dimensional context. From 1985 the dialogue between painting and sculpture drew closer and the large installations were more often than not based on the combinations of figurative sculpted elements with monochromatic pictorial scansions. In the artist’s room at Madre the unit formed by the heretic signs scratched on the rough surface of the walls and the sculpture projecting into space assume an environmental importance which plunges the spectator into a total epiphany.