Original lithograph by the artist entitled: la Luce diffidenta / Light is suspicious. Lithograph signed lower right and numbered 98 / 125

Made in 1993.
A certificate of authenticity is on the back of this lithograph (see photo)

Dimensions: 65cm x 44cm

Paolo Collini:

Paolo Collini's artistic activity took shape during his first solo exhibition in Milan in 1970. Indeed, it was in the city where he was born in 1950 that he began his relationship with the art world, a universe where, from his beginnings, he evolved in the field of the symbolic and surrealism.

After a period of training during which he explored in particular metaphysical painting and the visions of the surrealist masters, his research turned towards a dreamlike naturalistic vision, nourished by romantic inspirations hiding metamorphoses and enigmas revealing inner worlds.

During the 1980s, he gravitated towards "citationalism," an artistic movement developed at that time, with paintings rich in mysterious architectures where "Myth" and the sign of "suspended time" occupy the center of his narrative. The house-temple becomes the focal point of his exploration, and often, on deep waters, emblematic winged figures wander, concealing inviolable secrets, tracking the signs of a lost or perhaps forgotten classicism, inventing other allusions and symbols.

His love for ethereal atmospheres intensifies as he approaches German collectivism. During this period, traveling frequently, he abandoned Mediterranean colors for the cold colors of the North and the mysterious foliage of the Black Forest. Sunny hues disappear, giving way to a kind of bloodless monochrome, with evanescent azure shades and misty lights with mother-of-pearl transparencies. Nostalgia permeates his works; from the depths of his mind emerge archetypal creatures, symbols of immortal beauty, and from waters as deep as the night of time, waters that obsessively recur in his compositions: they often refer to the silences of the lake (where he has a studio at this time) or to the sea, which for him is not just a physical entity, it is much more: it is the symbol of the eternal feminine, of fertility, and of unfathomable and enigmatic depth.

The 1990s saw the relationship between the real and the imaginary transform into a pure and changing memory, wandering between Eros and Thanatos, icy pain and eternal doubts that often transcend the limits of reality. He prefers to work at dusk, when the noise of everyday life gives way to nocturnal reflections, listening to the suggestions of music, while the boundaries between reality, memory, and dream are often undefined.

In recent years, the city and its periphery have become the theater of his research, through fragments of images that offer the opportunity to observe the individual and their environment: it is the possibility of entering a "non-place" of the individual soul, balanced between everyday life, often endured, lived too quickly and violently, and a personal space where time is immobile, a time where one can stay as long as one wishes, meditating and moving to return to the real world perhaps a little different from what we were before, certainly enriched and involved as if returning from a journey.

Collini's painting has aroused the interest of critics for thirty years and has invited him to participate in numerous public and private art events, notably the Venice Biennale.

He has held over eighty solo exhibitions in Italy and abroad, which have been widely commented on in major newspapers and magazines. Among the publications dedicated to him are the monographs: "Magie antelucane di Collini" by Riccardo Barletta (Éd. Ghirlandina, Modena), "L'enigma della nostalgia" by Mario De Micheli (Éd. Mondadori, Milan), "Dimore dell'invisibile" by Luciano Caprile (Éd. Vinciana, Milan) and "Paolo Collini" by Mauro Carrera (Éd. MUP, Parma 2015).

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