MIMMO PALADINO           (Italian, born 1948)
Sette, 1991
Oil on canvas
118 x 149 1/2" (299.72 x 379.73 cm.)
Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery
Elisabeth H. Gates Fund, 2001

Mimmo Paladino came to the forefront of the international art scene in the late 1970s as one of a group of young artists that spearheaded an expressionist resurgence in painting and sculpture. By reviving figuration and symbolism, this group aimed to restore myth, mystery, and magic to contemporary art. An Italian critic dubbed this international trend the Transavantgarde, and its Italian practitioners included Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, and Mimmo Paladino.

Paladino lives in the small hilltop village of Paduli, Italy, not far from the village of Benevento where he was born in 1948. He attended art school from 1964 until 1968 at the Liceo Artistico di Benevento when minimalism and conceptualism dominated the international art scene. Paladino assimilated issues and ideas from these two movements and combined them with his desire to revive the expressive and emotive powers of art. In works such as this one, he paints haunting figures and forms that are inspired by the art and artifacts of many cultures from antiquity to the present. Fragments of things such as hands, heads, furniture, plants, and masks, are lushly painted to coalesce into an inscrutable whole. Paladino’s visual language is neither narrative nor linear. It is fluid and ambiguous because he feels that art should ask questions, never give answers. In this painting, even the title Sette, (Seven), adds to this quality of the unknown by referencing the number seven from the ancient kabbalah.

— Jennifer Bayles

Copyright © 2003 The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy