Giulio Paolini and Luca Bertolo. Detrás de la obra

March 8th - May 3rd, 2025

ISTITUTO ITALIANO DI CULTURA

Calle Mayor, 86. Madrid. Spain

On the occasion of ARCOmadrid 2025, a dialogue between Giulio Paolini, one of the leading artists of the new avant-gardes of the second half of the 20th century, and Luca Bertolo, one of the most important Italian painters of the present day.

The curator, Elena Volpato, has put into dialogue seventeen works, chosen from among the most relevant of his artistic career. They are installations, paintings and conceptual works that span a time span of sixty years, from 1963 to 2024, and narrate a continuous questioning of the reflexive nature of art and of that poetic, conceptual and expressive space that hides "behind the work", revealing its most fleeting dimension.

The exhibition is divided into three moments that explore some of the aspects of contact between the two artists: the relationship between the front and back of the canvas, the ambiguous status of the flag as an image, and the representation of absence. Three themes, as many as the main exhibition rooms of the Instituto Italiano de Cultura in Madrid, a place marked by the symbolic proximity of a painting such as Las Meninas by Velázquez, which is at the origin of the reflections at stake.

Paolini has been a primary figure of the new avant-gardes of the second half of the twentieth century for his analysis of the essential and constitutive elements of the visual work. In his enigmatic presence he has been searching for the meaning both of any departure from the past and of any possible recognition of the constants of art. It has borne witness to the urgency of an analysis that made it possible to begin again from a new starting point, but also to declare that this beginning was already within the classical tradition.

His examination has been able to verify the possibility of the continuous resurgence of representation, like an inescapable aura, inscribed in the naked objectual simplicity of the painting, in its threshold being towards the space of art.

Thirty years after Paolini's beginnings, Luca Bertolo began to paint from a similar reflection on the primary elements of painting and on the flat surface of the canvas as a space of approach, by negation, to the image. Working within painting, he has been finding paradoxical representations of the impossibility of fully telling oneself and the world. Responding to the deconstructions and reconstructions of the avant-garde, Bertolo is tracing a path in which belonging and remoteness from history, contemplation and mockery, mimetic painting and mental painting, overlap in his paradoxical pictorial investigation of the apparent impossibility of painting.

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