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PAOLO
GONZATO

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Paolo Gonzato (Busto Arsizio, 1975) lives and works in Milan. Trained at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, his artistic path moves between contemporary and functional art: paintings, sculptures, collages, installations and performances combine the study of design with the poetics of art. His works are present in public and private collections and have been exhibited in national and international, personal and collective exhibitions, including Officine Saffi and Camp Design Gallery, Milan; Cabana Mad, Lisbon; International Museum of Ceramics, Faenza; Venice Biennale; Tate Modern, London.
To his credit he has various curatorial experiences and non-profit projects; he has also collaborated with Fiorucci Art Trust and other realities for the realization of performances, DJ sets and site-specific interventions.






Paolo Gonzato defines his research as a mash-up of elements, modalities, possibilities in which nothing is absolute - from the Latin ab-solutus, free from creativity or constraints - and it can be evaded in a thousand possible ways. His works are born from the fertile hybridization between art, architecture, design and fashion: going to vivisect and analyze every possible reference of the vast aesthetic-cultural archipelago that informs his practice would be a taxonomic effort of little use to grasp his anti-academic and nomadic attitude.
Indeed, Gonzato is a trader: not only in a post-modern sense, or rather in the inexhaustible development of a glowing exercise in style. The conceptual process that leads to the visual or plastic concretion of his works recalls that paradoxical act of the artist which is “forgetting by heart”, dear to the artist Vincenzo Agnetti: the zero degree is neither possible nor desirable. The artist contaminates and re-signifies, in a key that oscillates between theatricality and the camp, scraps and fragments of a globalized, commodified and mestizo contemporaneity, seeking fluidity between concepts, materials, stately and low registers, poetic and prosaic.
The Out of stock series, developed over the years in multiple variations, is an example of this process, which starts from impromptu and transient fragments. Leftovers from the studio, as well as elements of everyday life or of people close to the artist, are set to music by the associated harlequin diamond pattern by Gonzato: while taking on disparate colors and shapes, its formal control and the recognizability of a classic. Even the Baracche are born from a humble inspiration, corrugated sheet metal - a makeshift architectural material, landscapes without design or quality: the artist sublimates their precariousness in bizarre luminous bodies, imperfections in precious one-off pieces.



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