Untitled (Van Dyck) Print

Alessandro Pagani is born in Milano in 1973. "...With a rapacious look, Pagani systematically incorporates visual material which defines and conserves the beauty of historic, aesthetic periods. He has an affinity with these periods and archives them in an orderly way on their own mental shelves. He is influenced by several cultural niches, by a power of magic, a power of penetrating beauty. We are always talking about secondary areas, interstices, residual areas, which the artist experiences a flavour for, and transforms them into sensations. Through these marginal spaces, authentic sliding doors to a stupefying ultra-reality, Pagani transports himself to distant locations, like a fugitive, or opium smoker (open the doors). For secondary types, like Blaxploitation, boxing, the cinema of the 1970s, the B grade movies, he explores the ravines of a lateral culture, emerging himself into an often hallucinatory bath … His paintings are traditional or classic. However in more recent works, a new element disrupts this formal equilibrium, generating a new rhythm, in composition and significance. The identity of the depicted characters which are well defined in the title of the works, like the grey composure of the depicted scenes (or rather replicated scenes: the cinema, a pretence of reality) are suddenly negated. It is an explosion of colour which annihilates man (in this pretence), his head exploding with a shot in a pictorial counterpoint." Gianluca D’Incà Levis