Pier Paolo Calzolari

A major figure in Italian contemporary art, as welle as an protagonist of the Arte Povera movement, Pier Paolo Calzolari has been developing since the 1960s an atypical work that revolves around a few recurring materials: tobacco leaf, salt, fire, frost, copper or lead. They play a role in a very personal universe defined by a hermetic and alchemical poetry, where each element both undergoes and produces transformations. Salt and ice conserve, but they can occasionally burn like fire.

Pier Paolo Calzolari's art is inspired by a Franciscan vision of the world, which envisioned a relationship of equality between beings - be they human or animal. It is therefore characterized by horizontal effects that are in some ways reminiscent of the stage of a theater. In a Calzolari's exhibition, each work contributes to the unfolding of a drama, a dream, a mystery - in the medieval sense of the word. This theatrical dimension unfolds in strange performances inhabited by albino animals but also by sculptures. Calzolari has often compared his work to a temple, in which the sculptures are "never seen as a closed act (...), but rather as the various parts of an organism starting a conversation. »