About the exhibition
Mimmo Paladino (Paduli, 1948) returns to exhibit at the Galleria Christina Stein in Milan four years after his last solo exhibition on Corso Monforte. Exhibited once again are his archaic compositions that engage in perfect dialogue with geometric and glyphic modernity, the formless and surreal, with the rhythms and contrasts of southern Italy, creating a physical and mental landscape full of fragments more than definite images. Paladino pursues a complex constructive strategy allowing him to condense and reorder symbols and figures of various origin and extraction without ideological constraints, honouring a sense of harmony and remote beauty, conveying qualities that are at times lyrical, at times dramatic, for a polyphonic concert of high notes and low notes, bright colours and deep blacks, voids and luminous spaces, leaps into the darkness and the negative. Paladino has always leaned toward the perfectly concerted organization of a flow of images and the recovery of a current of fragments that would otherwise remain buried under the surface of the present. He has loosened the hold of chronological time in his art, freed it of the separation of day from night and that unidirectional travel away from the past that tends to bury the cultural origin and magic of art under heaps of linguistic rubble.