Pier Paolo Calzolari

This monographic publication, edited by Achille Bonito Oliva and Andrea Viliani and co-published by Edizioni Madre, the publishing house of the Donnaregina Foundation for contemporary arts, and Silvana Editoriale, originates from and documents the exhibition Pier Paolo Calzolari. Painting as a Butterfly, organized in 2019 by the Museo Madre in Naples.
The volume offers a first thorough and complete investigation of the pictorial work of Pier Paolo Calzolari (Bologna, 1943), one of the most important contemporary Italian artists, since the sixties an exponent of the research related to the Arte Povera movement.

Paintings and drawings represent a lesser known, exhibited and studied part of Calzolari's artistic production - which articulates installation, sculpture, performance -, but an equally important one: the practice of painting – as the artist himself declares - is a “listening tool”, an intimate experiential form through which the artist has come to synthesize the multiple articulations of his research, both minimalist and sensual, conceptual and baroque.

Painting, the artist reveals, has always been the basis of his work: retracing his approaches and developments - a theme addressed in the unpublished critical essays of the curators, David Anfam and Vincenzo De Bellis - therefore offers the opportunity to read the entire work of Calzolari through a partially different perspective, from his studies on color and the effects of light or on the transformations of matter, to the relationship between two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality, up to the investigation of the relationship between work of art, space and observer which rewrites the very dimension of time.

Naples, Museo Madre, June - September 2019

Summary

Painting to Listen by. Interview between Pier Paolo Calzolari and Achille Bonito Oliva

The Temple of Sensations
David Anfam

Pier Paolo Calzolari and the Paradox of Fixity
Vincenzo De Bellis

From the Ideal to the Real Home: the Camerae Pictae of Pier Paolo Calzolari
Andrea Viliani

The Works, the Exhibition
Anna Cuomo, Eduardo Milone

The Sixties
The Seventies
Gli anni ottanta
The Eighties
Chambers of Painting
From Nineties to Today
Loop. Drawings and Projects
Loop. Works

Biography
Solo Exhibitions
Group Exhibitions
Bibliography
List of the Exhibited Works