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This
artist has been following a singular path for years, in the sense that
in Milan, his city of adoption - he was born in Basilicata - he allows
his artistic works, his paintings, to be admired in the famous open-air
exhibition staged every year in autumn and spring, in Via Bagutta.
Here
the people of Milan were able to enjoy looking at his paintings, which
are the result of a quest for truth and reality but also of an acceptance
of romanticism-realism centred on memories and revisited places and
objects dear to him. Paolo Martorano lets himself go and daydreams,
returning among beloved places and people. His realism embodies still
lifes and green and Apennine landscapes, hills and hill-towns, like
“San Martino d’Agri”. The still lifes appear for what they physically
are, naturalist annotations used to evoke the silent life of magic fruits,
interwoven with skilful shadows, exquisite colour intensities, whites,
pale greens, shades of red, oranges, copper colours, enamelled blacks.
Enlightened memories that recall the great painters of the period between
the 17th and 18th centuries, including the impressionists and the artists
belonging to the regional schools of Lombardy and Piedmont, not least
Fontanesi. Landscapes see the light as autobiographical outlines, places
experienced with fresh expressive enjoyment, a delicate auscultation
of nature, solar or autumnal, achieved through an extremely sound technique,
as tenacious as it is liberating, as romantic as it is realist, where
the impastos are vigilant and subtle, albeit full of a transfigured
colour, in a family atmosphere, like a melancholy legend. Thus beloved
and visited places manage to transmit very sweet tensions and plastic
memories. Taste and shape enhance the colour, materially; poetry and
sentiment take on an airy tension, a light that shines in a non-artificial
way, and plastic realism reacquires the balance of widespread colour
sensitivity, heightened by a sense of childhood astonishment. The paintings
show an attention to the creation of precise volumetric and compositional
harmonies, despite the freedom of execution, through a sinuous stroke
that cuts and outlines, here and there placidly by shadows, with no
abstract reference. A great landscape painter our Paolo Martorano, whose
poetic vision is that of a real southerner - full of strong colour.
And space is created by contrasting different chromatic spreads. It
should be added that the artist never paints large works. He keeps to
sizes that never exceed 60x80. And in fact he finds his strength and
creative vein in smaller works that convey a sort of classic beauty,
a completely interior heightening of reality and the possible, of nature
and of objects-still lives, as if a whisper of trees, a landscape made
clear by a dawn or sunset, were mirrored in the fire of the soul, to
the subdued song of a figurative poem. A very Italian painter, tied
above all to Italian figurativeness who for years, with supreme skill,
has entrusted to canvas the most beautiful places of Italy, renowned
and unknown, country and sea landscapes, and above all embodying in
them history, the life of man, the feeling he has for his origins, profound
and civil. (traduzione Interpres sas-Giussano)
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