Ercole pop 2022 Sculpture

Paolo Camporese was born in Padova on 14 February 1961. At the beginning his education was scientifically oriented: he got a degree in Agricultural Sciences and after obtaining his Ph.D. at Bologna, in 1992, he started an academic career as Adjunct Professor at Padova University. Since 2010 he has been teaching Natural Sciences at the Art School in Padova. Paolo Camporese has not chosen Art. Art has chosen him. The passion for sculpting and modelling chose Paolo while he was walking the farthest from it, on the way of Science, of experimental and rational Knowledge of Nature. Yet, is not Art the Alter Ego of Nature, its dream-like fake, childish imaginary friend and tough step-sister? From the connection "Earth-Creation-Spiritual Development" his love and passion for clay, the simplest and rawest but most original material, were born and nourished. So Paolo Camporese's favourite material has become earthenware: he learned modelling in Padova at the atelier of a local sculptor. There he acquired and started mastering the artistic techniques owing to the work of enlargement of well-known artworks by S. Dalì and F. Lèger. Then, he learned how to glaze and finish earthenware with ingobbio technique at a ceramic workshop and lab at Este. The artist has a primal instinct for modelling which he combines with his love for classic forms. The results are "learned" shapes that express the sculptor's knowledge of reality but do not simply end there. Paolo Camporese wanders in the Past working his way through the Present to the realm of Spirit, as an experienced but still innocent Pre-romantic Child, still linked to Classical ideals but willing to free himself through the Moderns. Here are the little lying abandoned feminine shapes of patina earthenware resembling Etruscan bronze women, while the glazed slightly coloured abstract forms show the artist's effort to escape from matter to reach the Soul of Things and its inner symmetry. Here the artist still draws on classical themes and motifs but combines them with the curved torsions and distortions of modernity, with no despise for slightly erotic hints in a quasi-Baroque accent. The golden glaze of the purest Byzantine tradition covers and finishes both abstract and mythological/allegorical figures in the continual search for the reassuring shelter of the olden times.