Paolo Picozza “In caduta libera con poco cielo...”

From December 18, 2013 to January 26, 2014, MACRO - Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Roma presents In caduta libera con poco cielo davanti, the first major exhibition in a public museum dedicated to Paolo Picozza, a Roman artist born in 1970 who died prematurely in September 2010. The exhibition, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva, brings together about forty of the artist's works, including large canvases, works on paper and some of his last unpublished works; a previously unpublished video interview is also on display. In the large canvases and preparatory sheets of paper Paolo Picozza depicts his city, Rome, among urban views and mighty suburbs, as well as landscapes of archaic countryside. 

Nature is interpreted by the artist in all its possible metamorphoses, through the recovery of an expressionist and Nordic spirit, emphasizing the gloom of the nocturnal atmosphere. The image is constructed with all the force of gesture, the figures acquire three-dimensionality on the surface thanks to the choice of materials and the chromatic and tonal scale. Picozza's painting is made up of thick, dense brushstrokes, dark colors and strong materials, usually black enamel and bitumen mixing with oil and acrylics. In the most recent works, brushstrokes of luminous whites, blades of light, emerge at intervals, traced to construct the perspective space that the eye has registered live. The exhibition-tribute to this young painter thus becomes a journey inside the contemporary landscape, along real spaces that are modified in a vision of dense matter and solid expressive tensions. 

The time described in Picozza's works seems dilated: "because it depicts an emotion experienced in a variable time frame. Often because of this there are no human figures, perhaps they pass through it, but they do not have the time to be stopped." (Paolo Picozza, excerpt from Inquiry into Art - Four Questions to Five Generations of Italian Artists, edited by Simone Battiato, 2008). A catalog, ed. Punctum, will be published for the occasion, with a critical text by Achille Bonito Oliva, a remembrance by Francesca Antonini and an interview with the artist by Simone Battiato (excerpt from the book "Inchiesta sull'arte - Quattro domande a cinque generazioni di artisti italiani," edited by Enrico Crispolti, ELECTA, 2008).