Alessandro Papetti
The years from 1980 to 1986 were those of research and the first personal exhibitions followed by participation, from 1988, in reviews in public spaces in Italy.
Between 1988 and 1990 his painting focuses on the theme of Portraits seen from above, a cycle to which, in 1989, Giovanni Testori will dedicate an article in the "Corriere della Sera".
This wide-angle view of reality will be followed between 1990 and 1992 by a cycle of paintings entitled Finds, in which the attention is focused more on the particular: a sort of analytical study on form, on the traces left by time in the atelier and factory interiors. .
As a natural consequence
Papetti, from 1992 will deepen his research on the themes of industrial archeology, as evidenced, among others, by the 1996 exhibition at the Civic Museums of Villa Manzoni in Lecco.
Since 1992 he has participated in exhibitions in public spaces and various art fairs in Europe and the United States.
Since 1995 he carries out his activity between Milan and Paris. That year he met the writer and biographer James Lord, who dedicated a significant critical text to him in 1996. Papetti's painting in that period follows in parallel the themes of interiors and portraits with particular attention to the study and deepening of the nude, themes chosen for the review The strength of the image, the painting of realism in Europe, held at the Martin- Gropius Bau in Berlin in 1996, as well as in the Sui Generis exhibition at the PAC in Milan, curated by Alessandro Riva.
These researches, combined with the need to "go out", to approach the "container" with a different psychological attitude, led from 1998 to the creation of the paintings of the Water cycle, exhibited for the first time at the Galleria Forni in Milan in 1999. Bodies suspended in motionless swimming pools or, as in the series Il bagno di notte, caught in the moment before plunging into the black of a sea illuminated only by a livid and lunar light. They are among the first images of figures represented in an exterior. As a consequence of this new pictorial cycle and the previous one dedicated to industrial environments, the shipyards were born.
Among the first exhibitions dedicated to this new theme we remember the one at the Galleria dello Scudo in Verona in 2003. Industrial ports, dry docks and gigantic hulls, bodies of ships expressed in their size and fragility.
Between 2003 and 2004 he was invited to participate in numerous museum reviews, such as the exhibition dedicated to Testori at Palazzo Reale in Milan or the exhibition The quest for identity curated by Vittorio Sgarbi and exhibited in various public spaces in Italy.
In 2005 he took part in the Miracle in Milan at Palazzo della Ragione and The contemporary Italian landscape at Palazzo Ducale in Gubbio. In the same year, the Mudima Foundation dedicates a first retrospective to him entitled The Discomfort of Painting, in which Papetti exhibits the last twenty years of his painting in a selection of works that start from the "Testorian" figures shot from above, to the latest paintings. of that period on the theme of the city. Six months later, the exhibition entitled The belly of the city. Quick "portraits" of the urban landscape, a "quick pass" through streets and squares in front of people and buildings inside which life seems to flow motionless and where the windows represent the passage between the inside and the outside, between the intimate and secret life and that necessarily shared in the chaos of a space that runs fast. Scans of time and places represented in the exhibition basically by the two opposing external-internal themes. In all these years Papetti periodically retraces, revisiting them, his past pictorial cycles.
His interest in the theme of industrial archeology led him to continuous research into the manner and subjects and to the creation of a series of paintings dedicated to the former Renault factories, exhibited in 2007 in the Musée des années 30 in Paris, in an exhibition by title Île Seguin. Also in 2007 Sgarbi invited him to participate in the Palazzo Reale exhibition in Milan Italian art. 1968-2007 Painting. The artist also participates in the exhibition The new Italian figuration. To be continued ... at the Borroni Factory in Bollate.
In 2009 he participated in the collective The soul of water, at Ca 'd'Oro in Venice, curated by Angelo Crespi, Elena Fontanella, Cosimo Damiano Fonseca, and in the No Landscape - The disappearance of the landscape exhibition, at the Bandera di Busto Foundation Arsizio, edited by Luca Beatrice. In September 2009, Palazzo Reale in Milan hosts his personal exhibition The cycle of time, an installation of three paintings mounted on circular structures measuring 3.30 meters high and 8 meters in diameter; inside these, the viewer is invited to enter to watch the canvases, which deal with the themes of water, wood and wind. The exhibition is curated by Achille Bonito Oliva.
In 2010, the Italian Cultural Institute in Tokyo hosted the artist's first solo show in Japan, entitled Spazi Dinamici, while the Buschlen Mowatt gallery in Vancouver dedicates a new solo show to him entitled Survey on movement. In the same year, Villa Manin di Codroipo created a solo exhibition of the artist entitled Occhi e lune, curated by Marco Goldin, in conjunction with the retrospective dedicated to Edvard Munch.
In 2011 he was invited to participate in the Italian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale entitled Art is not our thing, curated by Vittorio Sgarbi, and in the Pavilion of the Republic of Cuba, entitled Cuba Mon Amour. In September 2011 installs two of the three circles of The Cycle of Time at the Auditorium in Rome, while in April 2012 he created a solo show at the prestigious Moscow Museum of Architecture - Muar, entitled The factories of utopia. At the end of the same year he exhibited his personal Autobiography of painting at the Contini Gallery in Cortina, accompanied by a critical text in the catalog by Luca Beatrice.
In the spring of 2013, important personal exhibitions abroad took place, the first at the Everard Read gallery in Johannesburg, then in Berlin the Alessandro Papetti exhibition curated by Frederik Foert and Gianluca Ranzi at the Halle am Wasser at Hamburger Bahnhof and in the month of June in Paris, in the Mairie du Ier arrondissement.
Personal
2016 CIRCA Gallery, London
2015 Central Institute for Graphics, Palazzo Poli, Rome
Collective
2016 The Art Point of View, Casa del Mantegna, Mantua (exhibition promoted by the Mantua Territorial Center of the Milan Polytechnic)
2015 Italy docet | Laboratorium, a side event within the 56th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia
2014 Double dream, Palazzo Chiablese, Turin, curated by Luca Beatrice. Again by Luca Beatrice she is the curator of the exhibition La pelle through, inaugurated in June of the same year at Palazzo Penna - Center of Contemporary Culture (Perugia) where large paintings on paper and canvas investigate the ultimate boundary of leather.
Over the past fifteen years, Papetti has exhibited his works at important international art fairs and collaborates with numerous foreign galleries.