Paolo Fedeli - Firenze di notte

PAOLO FEDELI was born in Tuscany in 1957. He attended the Art Institute of Siena, earning the diploma of Maestro in Art. He has held numerous solo exhibitions in Italy and abroad. Among others, Ukraine, France, Russia, Spain, Rome and many others. He is represented in several Permanent Exhibitions. His works are in many public and private collections. His activity has been reviewed in national and international magazines and newspapers. He has participated in the major national collective art exhibitions, obtaining important mentions and critical recognitions. From 1979 to today he has earned as many as one hundred seventy-six First Prizes in painting competitions. Paolo Fedeli is the arcane cantor of nature.

THEY SAY OF HIM:

Paolo Fedeli is a painter of absolute elegance, a narrator of improbable and unknowable events, of questions without answers. His wandering between Tuscany and the anonymous metropolis of a contemporary West, where all architectural landscapes resemble each other in the absurdity of globalization, may also strike us as surprising. As, indeed, the changing of his language. Yet we see a subtle connection between the farmhouses, the hills, the clear skies, the night lights, the glossy streets damp with humidity, the swarthy atmospheres of smog: there are never living beings, as if people, daily life, work, love, hate, competition, wakefulness, sleep had eluded the artist’s imagination, which wanted to exclude from his poetics any reference to the social or, more precisely, to verism. Probably the French poet Paul Verlaine would have agreed with him, with due distance between words and colors:

You must also not choose your words without some error:
nothing is dearer than the gray song
in which the uncertain is joined to the precise.
Go as far as possible from the murderous wit
from the cruel spirit and from the impure laughter;
which make the blue eyes weep!
Take eloquence and twist its neck!

Thus, here is the key to Paolo Fedeli’s reading: self-reference and the surprising have been replaced by the vagueness of the uncertain. The rhetoric of the everyday and the clamor of dissonant voices have been replaced by the suspended silence of absence. The depiction of the recognizable has been replaced by the sublimation of the visual poetry.

Paolo Levi