Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, stop fawning over the latest insipid conceptual trends and lend an ear. I’m going to tell you about Mimmo Paladino, that Italian artist who deserves your attention more than any pretentious video installation. Here is an artist who had the audacity to resurrect figurative painting at a time when the avant-garde considered it dead and buried. In 1977, while cold conceptual art dominated, Paladino dared to create “Silenzioso, mi ritiro a dipingere un quadro” (Silently, I retire to paint a picture), a visual manifesto that announced his deliberate return to painting with all the transgressive force that this gesture implied [1]. It was as if he was saying to the artistic establishment: “Go to hell, I’m going to paint what I want.”
This defiance was not just a rebellious posture, it embodied a deep artistic vision. Paladino drew from the archaeological depths of his native Italy to create a visual language that transcends time. Born in Paduli near Benevento in 1948, he grew up surrounded by the vestiges of a region steeped in history, where Greek, Roman, and Christian relics coexist with the present [2]. This proximity to the past did not engender nostalgic sentimentality in him, but rather an acute awareness of the persistence of archaic myths and symbols in our collective psyche.
What strikes me about Paladino is that he breaks temporal and stylistic boundaries without ever falling into pastiche. Take his “Montagna di sale” (Mountain of Salt), that colossal installation first presented in Gibellina in 1990, then in Naples and Milan. Thirty charred wooden horses emerging from a fifteen-meter high mountain of salt [3], what a vision! It’s large-scale visual theater, an apocalyptic scene that functions like a collective hallucination.
Paladino maintains a fascinating relationship with architecture that goes far beyond aesthetics. His architectural works are not mere structures, they function as existential metaphors, questioning man’s place in the universe. When Paladino built his “Hortus Conclusus” in the cloister of San Domenico in Benevento in 1992, he did not just transform a public space, he created a personal cosmology, a microcosm where each element is part of a larger system of meaning [4].
Architecture, in Paladino, becomes an intermediary between the human body and the cosmos. As architect Peter Eisenman pointed out: “Architecture is that discipline which organizes the meeting of the body with the other, be it another body or the universe” [5]. Paladino transcends mere architectural collaboration to imagine spaces that disrupt our usual perception. His redesign of the Piazza dei Guidi in Vinci in 2006 does not just embellish the urban space, it creates a visual dialogue with Leonardo’s legacy, using geometric forms that recall the mathematical studies of the Renaissance master [6].
In his paintings, architecture appears as a spectral presence. His series titled “Architettura” (2000) presents fleeting signs and images drawn on cardboard reliefs, revisiting Cubo-Futurism and Constructivism with inventive freedom [7]. These works do not simply represent buildings, they question the very notion of construction, assembly, structure, both material and mental.
What distinguishes Paladino’s architectural approach is that it is never functionalist or rationalizing. On the contrary, it embraces mystery, the irrational, the symbolic. His environments are places of contemplation, liminal spaces where the spectator can experience a different temporality. There is a resonance with what Martin Heidegger called “building, dwelling, thinking”, the idea that authentic architecture is that which allows man to truly inhabit the world, to find his dwelling there [8].
The “Porta di Lampedusa” (2008), a monumental structure in terracotta and iron dedicated to the migrants who died at sea, perfectly illustrates this existential dimension. This door, which opens onto nothing concrete but onto the collective imagination, functions as a symbolic threshold between life and death, oblivion and memory [9]. It confronts the spectator with his own mortality while inviting him to meditate on the human condition.
Paladino’s attraction to primitive art is not just a formal appropriation, it is a stance of resistance against a disenchanted modernity. Unlike the colonialist vision of early 20th-century primitivism, Paladino is not seeking the exotic or the naive. He is interested in what anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss called “wild thought”, not primitive in the pejorative sense, but structurally different, organized according to a logic of the concrete [10].
Paladino’s stylized figures, his totemic animals and enigmatic masks are not mere visual quotations. They function as contemporary hieroglyphs, symbols whose meaning is never fixed but always in motion. In his sculptures like “Untitled” (1985), this limestone figure with deep marks on its surface, we find a formal simplicity that recalls tribal art and archaic kouros [11]. But Paladino does not imitate, he reinvents.
This primitivism becomes an act of subversion in an artistic world often dominated by technological and conceptual sophistication. As art critic Arthur Danto wrote about Paladino, there is in his work “an eminence that is his own”, a presence that commands respect through its evident connection with the roots of human artistic expression.
This connection with the primitive is not nostalgic or regressive, it is profoundly contemporary. In a world saturated with digital and virtual images, Paladino reaffirms the importance of materiality, of gesture, of trace. His works on paper, notably his series of etchings and woodcuts, testify to a tactile sensibility that opposes the growing dematerialization of our experience [13].
This approach echoes the reflections of philosopher Jean-François Lyotard on the postmodern condition, where the multiplicity of narratives replaces the grand unifying metanarratives [14]. Paladino does not propose a return to a mythical origin or a lost authenticity, he creates instead a play space where different temporalities and traditions can coexist and dialogue. His references to Egyptian, Etruscan and tribal art are not hierarchized but juxtaposed in a visual field where meaning emerges from their interaction.
What is remarkable about this contemporary primitivism is its self-awareness. Paladino knows that he cannot return to a prelapsarian innocence, he always operates within the context of a culture saturated with images and references. Yet, he manages to create works that retain an almost ritual evocative power. His “Dormienti” (The Sleepers), those 32 motionless terracotta figures exhibited in 2021 at the Cardi Gallery in Milan, possess this timeless quality of ritual objects, while clearly being the work of an artist fully conscious of the history of art [15].
A leading member of the Italian Transavantgarde, Paladino stands out for his ability to transform the most ordinary materials into objects charged with meaning. With him, painting is never just painting, it is a quasi-alchemical substance capable of transmuting the banal into the extraordinary. The way he incorporates found objects, branches, bicycles, umbrellas, into his paintings testifies to this transformative vision [16].
What sets Paladino apart from his contemporaries is that he maintains a productive tension between abstraction and figuration, narrative and symbol. Unlike his Transavantgarde colleagues like Chia or Clemente, whose works can sometimes lapse into easy expressionism, Paladino always maintains a certain restraint, an economy of means that intensifies the impact of his images.
I am convinced that Paladino’s art will outlast passing fads precisely because it refuses to be confined to easy categories. It is neither avant-garde nor traditionalist, neither abstract nor figurative, it is all of these at once, and that is its strength. As he himself asserted: “I believe that superficial art is very much in tune with our fast-paced era” [17]. Paladino invites us to slow down, to contemplate, to engage in an aesthetic experience that does not reveal itself instantly but unfolds over time.
In an artistic world obsessed with novelty, Paladino reminds us that true innovation often consists in rediscovering what has been forgotten or neglected. His work is not a commentary on art, it is art in its most direct and powerful form. And that, dear bunch of snobs, is something that deserves your attention.
- Norman Rosenthal, “C.C.C.P.: Back to the Future”, in Italian Art of the Twentieth Century. Painting and Sculpture, 1900-1988, Prestel with the Royal Academy, London, edited by Emily Braun, 1989.
- Flavio Arensi, “Paladino at Palazzo Reale”, with essays by Arthur Danto and Germano Celant, Firenze, Giunti, 2011.
- F. Arensi in J. Antonucci, Mimmo Paladino, Frederik Mejier Gardens & Sculpture Park, 2016.
- Enzo Di Martino and Klaus Albrecht Schröder, Mimmo Paladino, Graphic Work 1974-2001, New York, Rizzoli International Publications, 2002.
- Peter Eisenman, “The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, the End of the End”, Perspecta, Vol. 21, 1984.
- Norman Rosenthal, Mimmo Paladino, Black and White, Waddington Galleries, London, 2006.
- Massimo Carboni, “Mimmo Paladino”, Centro Pecci, Prato, Artforum, 2002.
- Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”, Essays and Conferences, Gallimard, 1958.
- Paolo Granata, University of Bologna, presentation of the exhibition “Mimmo Paladino Grafie della Vita”, 2013.
- Claude Lévi-Strauss, La Pensée sauvage, Plon, 1962.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, notice of the work “Untitled”, 1985, Mimmo Paladino.
- A. Danto, “Mimmo Paladino. Transavanguardia to Meridionalism”, in F. Arensi, Paladino Palazzo Reale, exhibition catalog, 2011, Giunti Editore.
- Michael Desmond, “Drawn from History and Myth”, in Memories and Voices, The Art of Mimmo Paladino, National Gallery of Australia, 1990.
- Jean-François Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne, Éditions de Minuit, 1979.
- Demetrio Paparoni, catalog of the exhibition “I Dormienti”, Cardi Gallery, Milan, 2021.
- Massimo Carboni, “Mimmo Paladino”, Centro Pecci, Prato, Artforum, 2002.
- Flash Art, cited by Irving Sandler, Art of the Post-Modern Era, Icon Editions, Harper Collins, New York, 1996.
