Pier Paolo Calzolari

Pier Paolo Calzolari (Bologna, 1943) lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal.

 

Calzolari spent his childhood and adolescence in Venice, whose Byzantine artistic heritage and particular light leave a deep trace on the sensitivity of the future artist. In 1965 he returned to Bologna and opened a studio at Palazzo Bentivoglio, where he realized the first works of painting and welcomed exhibitions by other artists, presenting the first 8mm and super8 films by Ari Marcopoulos, Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas ...

... and Mario Schifano and meets characters such as Allen Ginsberg, Julian Beck, Luigi Ontani, Raymond Hains and Chet Baker. In 1966-1967 he realized the first of his works-performances (The filter and welcome to the angel) that involves the spectators in a direct participation of the work and that Calzolari himself defines an "activation of space", according to a working method typical of his subsequent production: the "acts of passion".

Between 1967, the year in which he moved to Urbino, and 1972 Calzolari moved between Paris, New York and Berlin and brought his artistic project to maturity, establishing the parameters of his plastic vocabulary. In this period Calzolari is merged with the arte povera movement and his writing La casa ideale (1968) which finds fulfilment in a group of works, is considered by some to be one of the essential statements of this movement. In these years he realizes a wide cycle of works with freeze and neon structures, such as Horoscope as a project of my life (1968) and the Gesti series (1968-1969) in which the formation of frost on the forms, sanctioned by the passage of time, is an indication of the process of alchemical transformation of matter. In this way the objects and materials that the artist has been using since 1967 (fire, ice, lead, tin, salt, moss, tobacco) know a second life next to the luminous elements, a trace of the shine of Venetian marble.

Since 1972, the artist has focused on the study of painting in a deeply unconventional way.

Preferring new "supports", such as flannel or cardboard sheets glued to the canvas, the artist juxtaxed pictorial signs to real objects, such as small paper boats or moving trains along endlessly repeated paths. Calzolari's painting often remains linked to the physical involvement of people: in Berlin, for example, he realizes a series of performance works (collected in the book entitled Day After Day, a Family Life) such as Usura amore e misericordia (1972-1974) in which the artist, subverting every formalism, brings the ritual of everyday life to the level of aesthetic experience and in a horizontal relationship with the world and with history. His path, despite the evident proximity with the contemporary production of arte povera artists (in particular with Mario Merz and Jannis Kounellis), with Conceptual Art and The American Post Minimalism is characterized by several peculiar elements: the desire to saturate the senses, the way to make visible the data of abstract thought and the essence of things, the particular attention paid to the fragility of objects and materials.

Since 1973 it moves between Bologna, Paris and Milan where it settles for eight years continuing the parallel research between painting, sculpture and performance. Finally he moved to Turin and realized at the Tucci Russo gallery installations composed of large format paintings and performances.

Around 1982 he left Turin for Vienna, where he returned to focus mainly on painting and in 1984 decided for the quality of light, to return to Montefeltro where he still lives and works. During this stay in the urbinate, Calzolari is invited to participate in multiple residences abroad, in particular in France (La Ferme du Buisson, Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Atelier Calder, Le Fresnoy) during which he works in the field of dance, taking an interest in the study of the relationships between space, body and time, and thus giving new development to his performative work.