Paolo Punzo Biography
Paolo Punzo (1906 – 1979) was born in Bergamo in 1906. After his first marriage, in 1940, he went to live in Bergamo. Perhaps not unrelated to this decision, alongside the desire to get closer to the paternal family, is the passion for the mountains and its representation. In fact, since 1928, Punzo had begun to frequent the mountains of Valtellina, starting to paint landscape views in Valfurva. Thus were born his alpine landscapes, mostly characterized by an epic and celebratory landscape of the peak and the high altitude environment, which, at the beginning of the 1930s, ended up meeting with the fascist mystique of the mountains dear to the Mussolini regime. Punzo thus becomes, in the Lombardy context, the "mountain painter" par excellence, thanks also to his link with the CAI - the Italian Alpine Club, transformed by the regime into a vehicle of its heroic spiritualism of the peak and the Alp - at whose invitation In 1935 he held a large solo exhibition in Sondrio, in the City Council room and in Milan in the Club itself, where he continued to exhibit in the 1960s. The alpine landscapes of Punzo go far beyond the fascist rhetoric of the "fight with the Alps" or the "inviolate silence of the heights" and are not easily reduced to it. For Punzo, in fact, the emotion in front of a peak or an Alpine landscape is directly connected to the "truth" of its representation. In the wake of this general appreciation, starting from the Thirties and throughout the Fifties and Sixties, Punzo's exhibition activity became frenetic in Sondrio, Bergamo, Milan, St. Moritz, Cortina , which ensured him a good reputation and a solid economic position. Punzo, however, does not only paint high altitude Alpine landscapes, but also urban mountain environments, Alpine towns of which he tries to capture the spirit and signs of incipient modernity with a looser style and open to the expressive novelties of modern art , the same style that distinguishes the large group of his floral subjects from the 1960s and whose influence can be felt in his work as his travels and stays in Africa, Latin America and Peru continue in those years. Punzo then died in Bergamo in 1979.
