In Paladino’s work as in Baudelaire’s poetry, “forests of symbols” grow beneath the artist’s “familiar gaze” in an undisturbed equilibrium of nature and history, organicity and memory, Roman and Gothic, avant-garde and tradition, to legitimise the artist’s familiar and imaginative gaze and interweaving of citations that range from the medieval frescoes of Giotto to the sculptural purity of Arturo Martini. 

In this small panting by Mimmo Paladino entitled Solo (Alone), a white figure appears frontally; his eyes are closed as if he were meditating. One foot is delicately on the ground, on tiptoe. A red banner with the image of a white lamb is tied to his wrists. The interior organs of both the figure and the lamb are visible, as are the veins running through the figure’s body. The words “A TE” (For you) appear on the body, suggesting we are seeing a contemporary version of a crucifixion. Paladino adopted Charles Baudelaire’s idea of nature as unstoppable growth and development with luxuriant organic forms grafted onto one another for seemingly no reason as a metaphor of painting.¹ 

In its evolution from medieval times to the present, Western culture has attributed nature with two identities, namely natura naturans and natura naturata, the generative principle of every species governed by unfathomable laws and the product of transformation brought about by mankind, capable of definition and memory. Paladino’s figurative image in Solo, tends to confirm the definition of language as natura naturata delimited in the construction of its borders. 

It is a representation that tends to reduce the forest to the dimension of the garden. A member of the Transavanguardia group, Paladino adopts cultural nomadism and stylistic eclecticism embracing sculpture, fresco, mosaic, collage and architecture, opening up to history and its tragedies. With the former, he combines the Western concept of natura naturata with the eastern idea of paradise. With the latter, he creates a garden of figures and images structured in accordance with the sense of continuity and luxuriance characteristic of the garden. 

The artist becomes the fertile terrain producing a language bound up with the nature of the soil and its genius loci, the specific inspiration springing from the anthropological territory inhabited. The result is a gothic iconography interweaving human figures, animals and plants typical of the Lombard culture and art, many traces of which survive in the artist’s hometown of Benevento, Southern Italy. 

In Paladino’s work as in Baudelaire’s poetry, “forests of symbols” grow beneath the artist’s “familiar gaze” in an undisturbed equilibrium of nature and history, organicity and memory, Roman and Gothic, avant-garde and tradition, to legitimise the artist’s familiar and imaginative gaze and interweaving of citations that range from the medieval frescoes of Giotto to the sculptural purity of Arturo Martini. This purity of intent places artistic creativity and the growth of the garden on a par. Transition from the garden to paradise is then dictated by the construction of a pictorial space “beatified” by a temporal breath that freezes the times of art in the uniqueness of the image, a miraculous synthesis in the calm of an instant recalling both Arshile Gorky and the clarity of the Novecento group. Paladino’s image is instantaneous and felicitously static at the same time. 

The close relationship between Baudelaire and Paladino is born precisely out of the fact that they are both modern artists and inhabitants of a city that generates spleen and separation. Painting and poetry, sometimes also sculpture and drawing, are the languages that address the negative quality of modernity while also adopting some stylistic effects bound up with the transition from modern to postmodern: contamination, reconversion, recycling, deconstruction and the contextual memory of wholes, the latter being characteristic of the information age. 

Paladino’s manual technology that produces stylistic memory and the simultaneous ability to adopt figuration and abstraction, geometry and ornamentation: all condensed into the formal unity of the work as in a garden seen “from afar”, rife with correspondence between smells, colours and sounds, constructed by hand and hence in the dimension of “vicinity”. Paladino’s garden-paradise then requires to be contemplated in the dimension of “remoteness”, from a distance at which it is possible to perceive the formal balance of the whole and the differences between the “long echoes” of the images and the “forests of symbols”. 

Symbols are inherent in the growth of the image, in the creativity of art that distinguishes neither past, present and future nor even tree, humans and animals. If the garden represents specialised cultivation, paradise is instead the place of balance of the whole, the superseding of detail, transition from the specialised identity of the city to the easily indeterminate identity of paradise based on apparition. 

Achille Bonito Oliva 

Solo was originally part of a tryptich composed of paintings that were covered by wooden panels as if each of them was a small tabernacle. Exhibited in Paladino’s solo exhibition at the Diego Aragona Pignatelli Cortes Museum in Naples in 1995-96, this work was purchased by Francesco Federico Cerruti from Gian Enzo Sperone’s gallery, at the time located in Rome. Cerruti was most probably fascinated by the solitude expressed in the figure, by the sacred nature of the work, including its gold-leaf background which could enter into a meaningful relationship with the many gold-ground paintings in his collection, primarily from the 14th and 15th centuries [Ed.]. 

¹ This text was inspired by A. Bonito Oliva, “Transavanguardia: davanti c’è il bel canto, dietro la tortura”, in Rivoli 2002-03, pp. 29-31 [Ed.].