Biography
Waddington Galleries is pleased to present an exhibition of recent work, twelve paintings and four sculptures by the Italian artist, Mimmo Paladino.
The core of the exhibition is the large-scale canvases, painted predominantly in black and white, where Paladino uses his traditional imagery of fragmented heads, hands and arms, suggested helmets, shoes and masks, and sets them into an abstract backdrop. Paladino has developed this idiosyncratic visual language from a range of influences, particularly Etruscan and Ancient Roman art, with reference to early abstract expressionism in painting style. The result is an effect of melded modernity and archaism, immediacy and distant past, modern mark-making alongside archaeological iconography.
Norman Rosenthal writes: There is a sense of incisions made in black on white, white on black of splattered paint that tells stories of specific worlds, even of the last century, that are in danger of being lost in our rush towards modernity that sometimes seem to exist even without those temporal roots that ultimately define our culture.
The four sculptures in the exhibition are each unique. In plaster and aluminium, the surfaces of the three male figures and one female, are painted, again largely in black and white. The figures compositions are contained standing upright with arms close to sides and where the head has been included the faces are expressionless. The sculptures bring into three-dimension the iconography of the paintings, the disembodied human features, the inclusion of seemingly arbitrary objects, whilst treating the sculpture surface itself as a canvas.
