Santiago de Paoli

"de Paoli paints on singularly unusual supports which include felt, recycled textiles, as well as wood (often also recycled), and more recently, plaster. He does so for a reason that is not dissimilar to why and how he arrives at his subject matter: in order to obviate the high seriousness of painting. Indeed, his pictures, which are liable to combine moons or vases with genitalia, are evocative of the sense of humor, and weird innocence, of children. Unsullied by the corrosive and self-congratulatory stuff of (painterly) irony, his odd and disarming humor deliberately thwarts sophistication– or at least what we (in the art world) generally take sophistication to be. For de Paoli’s work is quite sophisticated.
His iconographic frame of reference includes everything from Italian renaissance painting to the
surrealism of Giorgio de Chirico to the thematic simplicity and obsessiveness of Giorgio Morandi as well as the antic weirdness of Philip Guston,– one is even tempted to think of the bewitching naïvety of, say, Alfredo Volpi, not to mention children’s books. In other words, these paintings are not a little timeless. The quality of their contemporaneity lies both within the raw, unassimilable, impulse of their creation and their immediate socio-political context. (...)"
Chris Sharp

Submitted by Galerie Jocelyn Wolff