Paolo Campagnolo

Paolo Campagnolo is a Roman artist in continuous evolutionary research. The artist
exploits the potential of two, apparently distant, materials such as metal and canvas, to create his supple and brilliant works. Pigmented glues, gold leaves, silver leaves, metals are attacked by the action of acids for coloring. Case and action intertwine in the swirling search for a semantic language that finds in the reflected light the ideal deus exmachina to communicate with the observer.

Modernism pioneers defended that design art and sculpture should lose their decorative aspects in favour of its functional side. They tend to self regulate the arts through the elimination of all that was not considered belonging to them. The art critic Clement Greenberg thought that the research of artisanal values should pass by both intensity and self-consciousness. Every art movement was facing the searching of a technique, a language that mediates through the artistic self and audience, in order to communicate the knot of concepts, the pathos of colors and the visceral flux of the soul.

The center of the creative idea starts from experimentation through the academic studies and also the interior design works, carried out while traveling through the most beautiful cities in the world. Campagnolo works the canvas as a material to be molded, raising it to a constant becoming through light. On the canvas, he creates the colors and in his later production, material changes according to both light and environment in which the work is immersed.

Three-dimensionality is inspired by contemporary Expanded Painting, meanwhile, the lesson of Lucio Fontana’s Spatialism comes out in the use of canvas as a material, no
longer as support. The surfaces react at both light and the surrounding environment. It would be impossible to resist to the sense of regeneration caused by the refraction and its lighting effects.