Art reviews

The paintings by Carlo Paganini are mysterious and alienating, broken by everyday life: joyful, fluid, airplanes, seemingly carefree but veined by an air of subtle unease hidden like the frames of a French film by Nouvelle Vague, evanescent, delicate, delicate paintings by Paganini are part of a vein of recovery of the poetry of everyday life that often the major art, the one that dominates the great museums and international exhibitions of the most "contemporary", has long since ceased to represent, taken as it is in the mad rush of linguistic experiments for their own sake, provocations, games of prestige that are increasingly abstruse and incomprehensible.

Instead, sometimes it happens that art finds itself the way of simplicity, of the joyful and fragmented story of the subtle but powerful poetry of our daily life: here then, as happens in Paganini's painting, an episode unexpectedly appears, an image , a situation, outlined in a few well-calibrated signs: sketches, lines, seemingly insignificant details that pop up as strange clues to translate and decipher. And then, intimate scenes, peaceful, elementary in their hieratic simplicity: a girl with her hands in her pockets, who smiles next to her bicycle, an old Vespa from another era, a yellow coat, a blue scarf, the window of a shop, the nose of that Citroën Dyane who has kept who knows how many secrets of our youth now flown away ...

Some touches of color, an enigmatic expression of a face, a gesture, a restlessness that makes its way under the gaze of a girl or a woman: the mysterious and rich story of the existence itself is unraveled from Carlo Paganini; a story that seems, in a few and significant traits, to reveal what hides the veil of Maya of the real under its apparent lightness, its illusionary, its fictitious inconclusiveness. Paganini's is an original visual, fragmented, bloodless, poised between reality and imagery, on the very thin border that separates our personal memories from our collective dreams.

Piacentino, self-taught, a life spent in the world of professions, with an eye for attention and attention to the innovation of style, fashions and customs, Paganini has achieved over time its own precise style, its own language, maturity of one's own visual grammar. His language is apparently complex, in reality simple: a black acrylic hand acts as a background, a colored material covers it, and then the artist's hand, like that of the xylograph, which gives life to the scene by engraving on the material with a stick pointed, in order to extract the black and sharp line of the outlines from the transparency of the material, and in this way build and give life to the scenes, the faces, the gestures of the characters on the canvas.

Small miracle, epiphany, discovery of the overwhelming force of the sign, as the sign of the first man laid on the sand: we play here, in the immediacy of the gesture and a vision extracted as a miracle from the fogs of memory, mystery and originality of the work of Carlo Paganini. Then, just a scene stolen with a cell phone, the image of a boy or a girl standing on the edge of the road, from which the artist borrows the forms and the expression, to reconnect the thread between past and present, between memory and actuality, between the mystery of form and the joyful melancholy of everyday life.

Vittorio Sgarbi