Paolo Collini Biography
Paolo Collini was born in Milan in 1950 and immediately began his relationship with the world of art which saw him move in the universe of the symbolic and surreal from the very beginning. After the training period in which he particularly investigated metaphysical painting and the visions of the surrealist masters, his research approaches a dreamily naturalistic vision fueled by romantic suggestions that hide metamorphoses and enigmas revealing inner worlds.
During the eighties he approached "quotationism", a pictorial movement that developed in those years, with a painting rich in mysterious architecture where the "Myth" and the sign of "suspended time" are at the center of his narrative. And the house-temple is the fulcrum of the investigation and where often, on deep waters, emblematic winged figures wander, hiding inviolable secrets tracing the signs of a lost or perhaps lost classicism, inventing other allusions and symbols.
His love for rarefied atmospheres intensifies when he approaches German collecting. In this period, traveling often, he abandons the Mediterranean chromatic tones, bewitched by the cold colors of the North and the mysterious foliage of the black forest. The sunny hues fade away, giving way to a sort of bloodless monochrome with blue evanescences and foggy lights with mother-of-pearl transparencies. Nostalgia hovers in his works, from the depths of his spirit emerge archetypal creatures, symbols of immortal beauty, and waters as deep as the mists of time, waters that return obsessively in his compositions: they often refer to the silences of the lake (where in this period has a studio) or of the sea which for him is not just a physical entity, it is much more: it is a symbol of the eternal feminine, of fertility and of unfathomable and enigmatic depths. The sequel of the nineties sees the relationship between real and imaginary transformed into pure and changeable memory, wandering between Eros and Thanatos, icy pain and eternal doubts that go beyond the threshold of reality. It is no coincidence that he prefers to work when the sun goes down, when the noise of everyday life gives way to nocturnal reflections, listening to the suggestions of music, while the boundaries between reality, memory and dreams are often undefined.
In the last period the theater of his research is the city and its suburbs which become, through fragments of images, the opportunity to observe the individual and what surrounds him: one has the possibility of entering a "non-place" of individual soul in balance between everyday life, often suffered, lived too quickly and violently, and a space where time is immobile in which to stay as long as one wants, meditating and getting excited to return to the world of reality perhaps a little different from before, certainly enriched and involved as if returning from a trip. He has held more than eighty personal exhibitions in Italy and abroad, reviewed in major newspapers and magazines. Among the publications dedicated to him we remember the monographs: “Magie antelucane di Collini” by Riccardo Barletta (Ed. Ghirlandina, Modena), “The enigma of nostalgia” by Mario De Micheli (Ed. Mondadori, Milan), “Dimore dell'invisibile ” by Luciano Caprile (Ed. Vinciana, Milan) and “Paolo Collini” by Mauro Carrera (MUP Editore, Parma 2015).
