Paolo Fedeli - a solitary strooll

PAOLO FEDELI was born in Tuscany in 1957. He attended the Art Institute of Siena, earning a diploma as Maestro 'Arte. He has mounted numerous solo shows in Italy and abroad. Among others, Ukraine, France, Russia, Spain, Rome and many others. He is present in several Permanent Exhibitions. His works appear 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, earning important citations and critical recognitions. From 1979 to today he has won as many as one hundred seventy-six First Prizes in painting contests. Paolo Fedeli is an arcane minstrel 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 panoramas resemble each other in the absurdity of globalization, may also strike us as surprising. As, moreover, the changing of his language. Yet we perceive a subtle connection between the farmhouses, the hills, the clear skies, the night lights, the streets slick with humidity, the murky atmospheres of smog: there are never living beings, as if people, daily life, work, love, hatred, competition, wakefulness, sleep have eluded the artist’s imagination, who has wished 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, once one respects the distance between words and colors:
It is also necessary that you not choose your words without some error:
nothing is dearer than the gray song in which the uncertain is joined to the exact.
Go as far as possible from the assassinating wit,
from the cruel spirit and from the impure laughter;
which make the eyes of blue weep!
Take eloquence and twist its neck!
Here is therefore the key to Paolo Fedeli’s reading: self-referentiality and the surprising have been replaced by the vagueness of the uncertain. The rhetoric of the everyday and the clamor of dissonant voices have been replaced by the suspended silence of absence. The depiction of the recognizable has been replaced by the sublimation of visual poetry.

Paolo Levi