ART-TRIBUTE:Pier Paolo Calzolari-Ensemble
Born in Bologna, Italy, Pier Paolo Calzolari was originally associated with Arte Povera. Calzolari’s work is the least repetitive and predictable to be found in the art of the past 50 years. Similarly, his activity cannot be linked to preconceived schemes. For him art is a springboard towards transformation, making use of ephemeral and transient materials.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo Galerie kamel mennour Archive
Pier Paolo Calzolari spent his you in Venice where he was influenced by the city’s particular light and its reflection on the marble of the buildings. These observations lead him to working with one of his most unique and defining materials in the form of frost to illustrate the perfect white, as it only can exist in nature. His other materials are also elemental and frequently organic: fire, salt, lead, tobacco, moss, burnt wood, oyster shells, tobacco leaves, felt neon, and on occasion butter. While Calzolari may be classified as an installation artist, his practice also includes painting, sculpture and performance. He created “Happenings” as early as 1966, drawing viewers into his artwork as performers in what he termed “An activation of space”. In the 1968 text “La casa ideale” he wrote “I would like people to know that I want expansion, democracy, madness, alchemy, craziness, rhythm, horizontality. I mean I want to be elementary, I want to commit acts of passion”. This text and it’s realization through a series of works, is considered one of the seminal statements of Arte Povera. Over the subsequent decades Calzolari has continued to experiment, exploring his ongoing interest in light, matter, and time within these media. The artist currently lives and works in the Marche region of Italy. For his solo exhibition entitled “Ensemble” he presents in both spaces of galerie kamel mennour, a number of his works dated 1968 to 2015, from the beginnings of Arte Povera to today. Calzolari is regenerating the elements of his own personal syntax, and with this exhibitionhe is laying the groundwork for a malleable world, like a musical formation. Lead, copper, wood, salt, frost structure and frost, ink, fire, flowers, and nuts. Collected from one work to another, this vocabulary of the everyday, studded with the impalpable, plays over and retunes its poetic pulsions by reforming the sensible thresholds through which the invisible infiltrates their organisation. This force of the invisible is the essence of Calzolari’s art. He makes contact with existence through its fleeting crystallisations: candle flame, breath, air, the crystallisation of frost… So many forms in formation beyond space and time. Here, Calzolari rediscovers one of his first remembered mysteries: the light of Venice. As a child, he often went to the riva degli Schiavoni with a box of coloured pencils. He would sit on a marble bench. As he drew, the light from the Lagoon caused the marmoreal white of the bench to shimmer: life revealed itself. In a contemporary world tensed with something waiting to be born, Calzolari pursues his enlivening ruptures. He contacts the primordial, listens to the lost voice of each thing, takes his bearings, 47, rue Saint-André des Arts & 6, rue du Pont de Lodi and moves in for it.
Info: galerie kamel mennour, 47 rue Saint-André des arts & 6 rue du Pont de Lodi, Paris, Duration: 29/1-/3/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.kamelmennour.com
