BY DINO MARANGON
After graduating in chemistry and pharmacy, he dedicated himself to art starting from the early 1960s
Paolo Patelli, born in Abazia, Istria, in 1934, returned to live in Italy after the Second World War. With a solid scientific background, having graduated in chemistry and pharmacy in Padua, he began painting in the early 1960s, operating within an informal framework. Close to the Venetian Spatialists, with whom he shared the environment of the Galleria del Cavallino, his artistic preferences soon shifted towards Tancredi, Turcato, but especially Gorky, Wols, Twombly, Tàpies, Kline and De Kooning.
Born in Abazia, Istria, in 1934, he has lived in Italy since the immediate postwar period
He was also fascinated by the attempts to explore and liberate consciousness made by the members of the Beat Generation, which complemented his deep interest in jazz and the aleatoric processes of John Cage, leading him to an encounter with the anti-intellectual practice of Zen. Tired of what he himself called "late informal patisserie," he felt the need for a more marked distinction and organization of the different pictorial components in works characterized by flat, uniform layers.
He became close to the Venetian Spatialists, sharing the environment of the Galleria del Cavallino with them
Despite his success, Patelli felt the desire to transcend any residual conception of the painting as a virtual window, seeking instead to transform painting into an object-based structure that could freely occupy the space. Drawing near to analytical painting in some respects, he exhibited in all the major foundational exhibitions of this trend, creating works often composed of several panels filled with repeated monochrome layers, reaffirming a profound will for silence. He then began to assemble different components within them along a development line that, rather than sharing the tautologies of the Arte Povera movement, led him to significant tangents with major figures in Anti-Form and Process Art. Add, remove was the title of an important video made in 1974, emphasizing how painting became a tool to involve space and the environment in an ever-deeper fusion between art and life. After a period of absence due to a great personal sorrow, the desire and necessity to paint slowly resurfaced, now conceived in terms of a more settled essentiality. Thus, a variety of forms emerged: free, multiform maps, traces of airplanes, landscapes populated by air, light, wind. Fascinated by the grandeur and magnetic secrets of ancient sacred structures, he created the large installation Stonehenge and the wide archetypal cycle of The great doors. Later, following the example of the Austrian Actionists, he abandoned the paintbrush altogether and began working directly with his hands in the series Projections of my body.
Fascinated by ancient sacred buildings, he created the large installation Stonehenge and the series The great doors
Anyway, his constant effort was to expand the boundaries of what could be painted, testing each component in the process by employing different tools and a wide range of pigments. As the new century began, on luminous surfaces of various forms and contours, made silky by a series of barely perceptible layers, multicolored drips began to bloom: clear, vivid microcosms, true and impalpable monads, often accompanied by transient, enigmatic writings, sometimes upside down. The meaning of these writings was intentionally mysterious, but not entirely erased, adding to the richness of these ever-renewed crystalline pictorial universes. These works are the result of extraordinary skill and the difficult freedom in living and giving an image to the sacred flow of existence.
Following the example of the Austrian Actionists, he directly engaged with his hands in the series Projections of my body
