Paolo Fedeli - Nocturno

PAOLO FEDELI was born in Tuscany in 1957. He attended the art institute in Siena, earning the Master’s diploma in Art. He has staged numerous solo exhibitions in Italy and abroad. Among others, Ukraine, France, Russia, Spain, Rome and many others. He is present in several Permanent Exhibitions. His works are featured 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 group art shows, obtaining important citations and critical recognitions. From 1979 to today he has won a remarkable one hundred seventy-six First Prizes in painting competitions. Paolo Fedeli is a cantor of the arcane nature.

PEOPLE SAY ABOUT 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 panoramas resemble each other in the absurdity of globalization, may also strike us as surprising. As does the change in his language. Yet we see a subtle connection between the farmhouses, the rolling hills, the clear skies, the nighttime lights, the glossy streets damp with humidity, the dusky atmospheres of smog: there are never living beings, as if people, daily life, work, love, hatred, competition, vigil, sleep have eluded the artist’s imagination, who has chosen to exclude from his poetics any reference to the social, or, more precisely, to verismo. Probably the French poet Paul Verlaine would have agreed with him, with due distance between words and colors:

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

Thus the key to Paolo Fedeli’s reading is this: self-referentiality and the surprising have been replaced by the vagueness of the uncertain. The rhetoric of the quotidian and the clamor of dissonant voices have been replaced by the suspended silence of absence. The depiction of the recognizable has been replaced by the sublimation of visual poetry.

Paolo Levi