The Galleria Franco Noero in Turin presents a solo show by Pier Paolo Calzolari, for the first time in the gallery in the spaces of via Mottalciata, which can be visited until 20 September 2025. The artist conceived an exhibition of works belonging to its last or recent years production gathered for the first time in Italy, tracing a trajectory that tells of its constant interest for a topical topic such as painting and for the elements that
They constitute it, in such a way as to propose a completely unconventional reading, as always testified by its artistic practice in its entirety.
The materials used are those that distinguish the artist’s production and constitute the figure, materials that make direct reference to primary elements – air, land, water – water – and to their specific characteristics of essentiality, purity and transformative dynamism, to which are added those highly evocative tactile qualities that are instead specific to the individual material. The crispy crystalline roughness of salt, the soft and soft thickness of the cotton of the soft octods, the thin metal plates shaped to reveal its ductility are the surfaces on which a narrative is grafted by tonal elements such as shells, flames, feathers, flowers of flowers and dried fruits, which all participate in A poetic reading of the cosmos of which we are part.
There is a great ability to manage the dimensional staircase, grasping and giving the adequate dignity proportional to the chosen objects, both within the space of the work in which they are part, and in the reverberation that create wider and wider inside of the space in which they are located. There is the feeling of being constantly solicited in the suspension between two and three dimensions, in a space that can be seen as a operatic horizontal and vertically, the third dimension awarded by what rests on the ground or on the level of the wall on the wall. It is a denial of the perspective space, in favor of a dimension and a representation previous to it that emphasizes the grain and the plot of the surfaces, perceived in their exact and frugal elegance, on the color used as a flat field or which pure pigment powder managed on it, and on the objects that participate in the work simply by presenting themselves as they are actually, and consequently three.
Three large works dominate the space of the main room of the gallery, illuminated by the large central skylight. Plastic values cites the homonymous movement and contains both the characteristic elements of the beginning in the 1960s, such as the changing and transformative energy of the icy elements, and those that refer more directly to the quotation and deconstruction of painting and its trespassing in the third dimension. A tableau vivant similar in the plant to an abstract dead nature, in which the absolute forms of an egg stand out, perhaps in homage to Piero della 
Francesca, and an enigmatic black sphere, against the background of a pink carnicino canvas activated by the naturalistic arranged of a copper wire which, as if it were a branch, dives into the frost of an icing tube. Similarly, in the other two works in the same room, a couple of slender copper bottles are interpenetrated in a silver rain of cut flowers that cross the canvas vertically. Next, in the profound luminescence of a black salt seabed, colored pitches appear that light up as tiny stars on the flowering tips of a branch, quilts in a celestial firmament and reflected in the multicolored plot of a juxtaposed ceramic vase.
On a last wall, and in those of the room to follow with the ribbon windows overlooking via Mottalciata, a choice of works on a monochrome background are the scene of surprising epiphanies: pigments that allude to floral landscapes, the whitish rippling of the
Marine waves on the depth of the blue in which the valley of an oyster is set, small spherical flowers between the quick oblique brushstrokes like drops of rain, a fastened cannolicchio baked in the bright yellow of the corolla of a flower, as if it were his pistil. The monochrome of yellow and blue is therefore the theme of the room on via Mottalciata, in which two large works are facing the opposite that explore the expressive possibilities of these two colors: the large plot of a background warp lets appear in the foreground and in the center those that appear like the flattened outlines of a lemon on a tablecloth, or perhaps the colon of a long -handed brill Organic and tortuous branches of a monumental bonsai seem to cross the earth and the sky.
Earth and Heaven also meet in ‘Triptychu’ in the last room, in which an slender meadow of essential stems and ethereal petals is single -dimensionally described by liquid and lactiginous colors, an permeable surface such as that of the picture next to it, quilted with golden drops and populated by transparent jugs. In front of a theory of variations on Rosso, which reaches the climax in a picture in which an explosive pastry of purple pigments bursts, chromatically powerful as an Iris or like the gas of a flame that burns, on an intensely saturated bottom.
Pier Paolo Calzolari (Bologna, 1943) He is a prominent figure of the movement of poor art, whose work is strongly characterized by the use of unconventional and dynamic materials, such as the light of the bright candles or of the neon, the salt, the musk, the leaves, the ice and the coils of the refrigerators, the metals and the felt. Anchored to poor art, the search for Calzolari is however distinguished by an introspective approach in search of poetry in the objects of his personal daily life. His work was exhibited three times at the Venice Biennale, in 1978, 1980 and 1990, and Documents from Kassel in 1992.
In 1994 he was dedicated an important retrospective to the National Galerie du Jeu de Paume in Paris and at the Castello di Rivoli Museum in Turin. Calzolari’s works are exhibited in important museums from all over the world, such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Maxxi – Museum of the 16th century arts of Rome, Palazzo Grassi, Punta della Dogana, François Pinault Foundation in Venice. In 2019, Calzolari was the subject of a large retrospective, painting as a butterfly, at the Mother Museum of Naples, edited by Achille Bonito Oliva and Andrea Villani. More recently, in 2023-24, ideal house, a great personal exhibition on the artist’s work was held at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, Villa Paloma, Munich, while for Povera art, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev at Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection in Paris, France, presented a large installation focused on works belonging to the years of the movement of the movement of the movement of the movement of the movement of the movement of the movement artistic to which they refer.
Currently the artist lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal.
Carlo Franza