Pier Paolo Calzolari:
Le Terre Est Bleue Comme une Orange
by Richard Milazzo.

First edition deluxe hardback: July 2024.
Designed by Richard Milazzo.
With an Italian translation by Ginevra Quadrio Curzio.
168 pages, with a 4-colour gatefold jacket, a black and white photograph of the artist on the frontispiece, 30 color and black and white illustrations and 20 full-color plate reproductions.
10 x 11.5 x 1 in. (25.4 x 29.2 x 2.5 cm.), printed, sewn, and bound in Modena, Italy.
Modena, Italy: Galleria Mazzoli Editore, July 2024.

RETAIL PRICE: $150.00 (includes postage and handling)

Pier Paola Calzolari: Le Terre Est Bleue Comme une Orange, is the third show Galleria Mazzoli has mounted of the artist’s work. Although forty-five years have passed since the first show in 1979 (the second one was in 1981), the gallerist, Emilio Mazzoli, has never stopped lauding Calzolari as one of the greatest artists to emerge in Europe since the Second World War.

For this exhibition of 11 paintings and 4 drawings, Emilio Mazzoli has conscripted the art critic, curator and independent scholar, Richard Milazzo, no friend of Conceptual or Minimal Art, to write for the catalogue a major three-part critical essay about the artist: “The Silent Circus: The Illicit and Inept Rhapsodies of Pier Paolo Calzolari.”

What follows is an excerpt from the essay: “Although somewhat more lenient when it comes to the European iterations of the modalities of Minimalism and Conceptualism, better known as Arte Povera in Italy, as opposed to what can be called the corporate version of these movements in the U.S., what is at the heart of the conflation of these two modalities in Pier Paolo Calzolari’s work is the ancient act of poeisis.

“The difference between the two cultures is the rampant rational and ideological belief in materials for materials’ sake, which often amounts to a form of materialism in the U.S, despite the rhetoric of ‘dematerialization’; whereas Calzolari, not unaware of the politics of his time, especially during the 1960s and ’70s, has dialectically suspended that belief, in behalf of a blind faith, an existential ‘blindness’ (that is the artist’s own word), not just in materials, but in sculpture, in the exquisite hybrid constellations of the materials animating his installations over the years, and, most controversially, in paintings that have found themselves both inside and outside these parameters, often turning the paintings themselves, as in this show, into their own kinds of installations.

“What obtains in Calzolari’s practice are the ‘post-installation’ parameters of painting as a viable form of art, proclamation-free and yet categorically subversive – which is to say, his paintings are more intimate than our expectations would allow, but never less outré, even louche, and self-exiled, where his art expresses ultimately an inapposable and unappeasable reality.

“Rather than playing to the three-ring circus of culture – Arte Povera, transavantguard, and nouveau realisme or American Pop Art – in the last fifty or so years, Pier Paolo Calzolari has always sought the radical quietude of the sideshow or what I am calling here the ‘Silent Circus’ of art reaching beyond itself, or what the artist has called the poetry of the ‘suspended song.’ When he has been compelled to enter the three-ring circus of several documentas, Venice Biennales, and gallery shows, he has always done so as a trapeze artist hurling himself across the space-time continuum without a safety net. Risking all in behalf of the poetry of art, the art of making art, a tautological form of creative ecstasy.

“Perhaps the artist himself put it best, as early as the late 1960s, nearly a half century ago, especially in relation to the odd man out, namely painting, in terms of so-called avant-guard practice, avant-guardism often itself academic and reactionary in nature: ‘If one negates painting when it is still alive, one does so out of desire for something that burns still more than painting, something that touches ‘feelings,’ impossibility and emotion itself.’ And that something is art, unshackled, untoward, even unseemly, and often taking the formless, illicit, inept, and rapturous reality of the soul bursting beyond itself into forms of poetry we shall never be able to reduce, not even to words and not even to the sacred (or should we say sanctimonious) materialism of art.

“Given what I view as my own prejudices and strong opinions about the art under scrutiny here, I have brought other voices into the tent of this silent circus, so that other vistas may obtain, even if only from the rafters: Germano Celant, Catherine David, Bruno Corà, Mario Bertoni, Massimiliano Gioni, Denys Zacharopouos, Luciana Rogozinski, Achille Bonito Oliva, David Anfam, Vincenzo de Bellis, Andrea Viliani, Ana Cuomo and Eduardo Milone, and, of course, the august artist himself, Pier Paolo Calzolari.

“Art history is an untamable creature, no matter how many lion tamers or ringmasters we invite into the temple or circus tent. For those who have the courage to stick their heads into the lion’s mouth, I have only these words to proffer, which could function both as a caveat and an epigram here: ‘dead animals / evolve / into circular suicides / the length / of a man’s neck / in the throat of a lion.’ Which applies to me perhaps more than to all the others unknowingly congregated here.”

Pier Paolo Calzolari was born in 1943 in Bologna, Italy. As a young man, he taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Urbino, and was invited to participate in a show that will make history, known simply by its subtitle, When Attitudes Become Form, curated by Harald Szeemann at the Kunsthalle Bern. Calzolari was only twenty-five years old at the time. Having impressed one and all by his efforts, he will be invited to participate in documenta 5, in 1972. During the past decades, Calzolari has participated in exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum and MoMA PS1 in New York, and at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Naples came knocking in 2019, giving him a retrospective, Painting as a Butterfly, at the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina. Among the countless one-person gallery and museum exhibitions Calzolari has had, from 1965 to the present, we must count shows with Bentivoglio in Bologna, the Sperone and Sonnabend galleries in Turin, Rome and Paris, the Knoedler, Gladstone, and Zwirner galleries in Zurich, New York, and Cologne, respectively. Other significant one-persons shows in the next three decades include: Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris; Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin; and FAE Musée d’art contemporain, Pully - Lausanne. Among other group shows of significance, there were exhibitions at Galleria La Tartaruga, Rome; Kunsthalle, Bern; The Philadelphia Museum of Art; Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna, Turin; the various Biennials in Venice;  Musee National d’art Modern - Centre George Pompidou, Paris; the various documentas in Kassel; Neues Museum Weserburg, Bremen; Kunsthalle Nürnberg; and IVAN Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderna, Valencia.