Eickholt Gallery :: Paolo PelosiniPaolo Pelosini is is an artist educated in painting at the Academy of Art in Florence and at the University of Minnesota. Eventually he moved to sculpture, a medium more congenial to his temperament.
He works in both Italy and in his New York studio.
The work is generally made with metal objects, found in the streets of Manhattan, such as file cabinets, oil drums, shelves, and cans, to which the sculptor refers to as "the local stone."
These objects are then cut with an ax and recycled into works of art that retain the dirt, smells, and other signs of human use and contamination.
The studio at first sight seems a world devastated and in ruins, a world with no traces left of Paolo Pelosini's native Tuscany, however, after the initial impression, one begins to see in the wreckage, complex and formally sophisticated images, fruits of a classical education.
The sculptures--aggressive and forbidding, due to the sharpness of the metal--are a journey through art. Art in its totality is at the disposal of the artist. The dichotomy between figurative and abstract has been overcome and many styles coexist. A Venus in a classical pose, a disemboweled drum with modern tendencies, a furiously primitive embrace, cohabit the same space, integrated by formal cohesiveness.
The sculptor begins a project without a precise idea in mind. He slices metal with a large ax, creating sharp and tormented edges. This process, with its intense physical action, transposes the artist's emotions from the subconscious to the art object. The finished works are highly expressive and loaded with personal meaning.
Art derives its power from its ability to impress itself on the psyche of the individual. The work of Paolo Pelosini is memorable for its unique intensity and strange beauty.
Pier Luigi Bianchi
