Donald Kuspit on Pier Paolo Calzolari
All thirty of the works in “Portray as a Butterfly”—an exhibition by Italian artist Pier Paolo Calzolari—had been abstractions. Some had been geometric or almost monochromatic, whereas a number of others, corresponding to Rideau V, 1984, a landscape-like image suffused by a midnight blue, had been gestural and filled with luscious, flourishing, sensual colours. Operating throughout the highest of Rideau V is a fringe of variegated gold and crimson, from which a collection of skinny vertical strains descend, like delicate rain. Little blossoms of crimson scale these marks as an uneven band of darkish yellow pierces the middle of the canvas lengthwise, calling to thoughts a dusky horizon.
Other than that piece, all the opposite works on this presentation featured wooden as their major helps whereas incorporating an entire host of various media, together with paper, flannel, cardboard, and lead. A handful of images, corresponding to Untitled, 2021, by which a lone feather seemingly grows out of a walnut shell, each of which hover over a bright-red floor, integrated objects jutting out from flatly coloured surfaces—a type of modernist tweak on trompe l’oeil. Maybe the feather is all that continues to be of the wing of Icarus, who flew too near the solar and fell to his demise within the sea. Calzolari, who was raised in Venice, was born solely two years earlier than the tip of World Struggle II, so one wonders if work corresponding to Senza titolo (Luna) (Untitled [Moon]), 1979, and Pantano grande (Nice Quagmire), 2019—gloomy, midnight compositions overwhelmed by creeping darkish blues—are literally meditations on finitude, mortality. The artist was a founding member of Arte Povera, a motion identified for using discarded or “lifeless” supplies, and the works right here had been full of such gadgets, in addition to salt, the stuff of life that can also be used, contrarily, to protect meat—one other type of deceased matter.
The title of Calzolari’s exhibition right here referred to as to thoughts Taoist thinker Zhuangzi’s well-known dream of being a fluttering, carefree butterfly. “Tao” is the identify for the kinetic generative energies of the universe, and Zhuangzi’s lightsome insect appears emblematic of what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi famously referred to as a “movement state.” Thus, portray as a butterfly, the artist is caught up in a “means of turning into, a inventive advance into novelty,” to make use of thinker Alfred North Whitehead’s phrases. Certainly, Calzolari is fortunately making no matter he desires, producing artworks with no preconceptions and using supplies he’s possible all too aware of in recent, unusual, and vivifying methods. So one would possibly imagine that now, in his late seventies, the artist is having a type of second childhood—a type of self-defense introduced on by the regular and relentless strategy of demise. Drawing the nectar out of colour and distilling his flat surfaces into Platonic purity, he has created a singular and lyrical artwork—reminding one in all Wassily Kandinsky’s concept that idiosyncrasy is the signal of authenticity. A haiku all the time includes a reference to nature, and Calzolari’s painted haikus present his longing to return to the pure world, which abstraction eschews. His romance with nature was evident in lots of of those expressionistic works, whereas within the extra purely summary pictures it was merely an afterthought. The artist crafts a pressure between poetic expressionism and the nonobjective; this wealthy house offers his works an additional emotional edge—a type of efflorescence of spirit simply earlier than the tip.
— Donald Kuspit
