A leading personality of Arte Povera in Athens
The exhibition “Demons and dew” with 20 new works by the Italian artist hosted at the Bernier/Eliades Gallery until January 26.
Iconic form of Arte Povera, in the 1960s, one of the most important living Italian artists, whose practice spans painting, sculpture, sound, performance, architecture and video, Pier Paolo Calçolari found himself in Athens . once again, for yesterday’s opening of his exhibition entitled “Demons and dew” at the Bernier/Eliades gallery.
Poet and alchemist of modern art, as he is characterized, the 79-year-old artist elevates the ritual of everyday life to the level of aesthetic experience, focuses on the fragility of matter, visually renders the abstraction of thought. He always goes with his dreams, realistic but also unreal, because “dreams last a long time and accompany the end”, as he has stated.
In the new exhibition at Bernier/Eliades (sixth in a row since 1978), Calçolari will present 20 new works, like a meditation on the transience and delicate beauty of everyday life. And in these he continues to incorporate sculptural elements from organic matter, such as salt, feathers, shamrocks and shells. With raw pigment powders and temperas on his canvases, he creates fields of intense primary yellows, reds, blues and whites, with varied surfaces and textures, that bring to mind sunlight, fire, the night sky.
Pier Paolo Calzolari was born in Bologna in 1943, he spent his childhood and teenage years in Venice, whose Byzantine artistic tradition and the special light it evokes are a source of inspiration. In 1965, he returned to Bologna, where he created his own studio and his first paintings and organized exhibitions of other artists, such as Aris Markopoulos, Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas and Mario Schifano.
In 1966 – 1967 he creates his first installation “Il filtro e benvenuto all’ angelo” (“The filter welcomes the angel”), which includes light, darkness, grass and birds. It is one of the first interactive installations of the time, as it requires the active participation of the spectators, who are invited to dress and undress, to move, gather, take walks. The artist calls his work “activation space”.
At the end of the 60s, Calçolari is associated with Arte Povera and his text “La casa ideale” (“The ideal house”) is considered one of the movement’s milestones. He begins to create works using refrigeration and neon, such as “Oroscopo come progetto della mia vita” (“The horoscope as my life’s work”) and the series “Gesti” (“Gestures”), in which the formation of ice created over time is reminiscent of the alchemical transformation of matter.
The innovative, tireless creator, in recent years, lives and works in Lisbon. He has held monumental exhibitions worldwide, while his latest retrospective entitled “Painting as a butterfly” was presented, in 2019, at the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina in Naples.
📌 Information: Bernier/Eliades, 11 Eptahalkou, Athens, tel. 2103413935-7. The exhibition will last until 26/1.