The research of Mimmo Paladino (Paduli, Benevento, 1948), initially centred on photography and, in parallel, on an assiduous practice of drawing, has developed a language that is among the most personal and authoritative of recent decades, articulated around a complex imaginary iconography, whose roots can be traced back to Mediterranean culture. One of the protagonists of the return to painting that characterised the late 1970s, he is the author of the famous Silenzioso, mi ritiro a dipingere un quadro (1977), almost a programmatic declaration, for a work that is today considered exemplary of that passage, following the long conceptual season. The years between 1978 and 1980 are marked by the production of monochrome paintings in bold colours, on which geometric structures are set up. These works testify to a period of transition towards a renewed focus on figurative painting, the recovery of linguistic modules that re-emerge from tradition and the history of art, recovering the subjective dimension of the creative act: a decisive stance in favour of the “reasons for painting”, which brings him close to those artists – Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Sandro Chia and Nicola De Maria – who were to become the authors of the Transavanguardia.
Paladino syncretically explores Christian culture and classical mythology, ancient Egypt and the Etruscan world, pre-Roman civilisations and primitive art, up to the avant-garde movements of the 20th century, references to which he has added, since 1982, an animistic component, assimilated during his numerous trips to Brazil. A constant experimenter, the artist establishes a close dialogue between painting and sculpture, introducing modelled forms and recycled objects into the surface of the painting, which gradually break free from their initial support to live autonomously in the third dimension, while his sculptures resemble ethereal primordial mannequins with an abstract and suspended expression, absorbed in an alienating calm, the expression of an ancestral and almost shamanic, archaic and dreamlike metaphysics, nourished by references to myth, to archetypal imagery populated by fragments, fragments of figures, hands, heads, elements of a language that blends different spaces and times, defining an unmistakable alphabet of plastic signs without a univocal dimension.
In 1990 he experimented with set design for the first time, creating the Montagna di sale (Salt Mountain) for J.C.F. Schiller’s The Bride of Messina in Gibellina, a memorable installation that was later reproposed in Piazza del Plebiscito in Naples (1995-96) and later in Piazza del Duomo in Milan (2011). In 2000 he designed the sets for Oedipus Rex, directed by Mario Martone, an experiment in collaboration between theatre and the visual arts which was renewed with Oedipus at Colonus (2004), two projects which won Paladino the Ubu prize. Paladino’s incursion into cinema was also marked by trespassing, with the direction of Quijote (2006), a full-length film that takes the form of a redefined path of contamination between different artistic and narrative languages. More recent is Labyrinthus (2013), dedicated to the life and works of Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa: “creating a film”, says the artist, “is something similar to sculpture, but it is like shaping light. Working with light that materialises, that becomes image, movement, word, sound”.