Mimmo Paladino

“Space is a non-determining circumstance. The dimensions of a small table can suffice to provoke tensions and strategies worthy of the grandest fresco.” He is one of the most acclaimed representatives of the Transavanguardia movement, theorized in 1980 by the critic Achille Bonito Oliva, which exploded in that year’s “Aperto” section of the Biennale: the artists reclaimed a return to painting at the expense of the dematerialization sought by Minimalism and Conceptualism. Paladino’s experience evolved in the 1980s, combining abstract language with a renewed attention to the figurative. In 1964, while visiting the Venice Biennale, he was deeply impressed by the American Pop artists. Through dense references to myth and developing archetypal images, he posits an art with an archaic, Mediterranean, and dreamlike flavor, centered on the themes of memory and fragment.