MIART 2022
On May 20, 1965, Paolo Masi inaugurated a solo exhibition at the Galleria Aquilone on via Santo Spirito in Florence, a reality self-managed by artists and theorists including ceramicist Fabrizio Fabbrini and critic Claudio Popovich. The format echoes the type of traveling exhibitions-debates in vogue in those years, presented in political venues (usually people's houses) and introduced by a debate open to the public, in a dimension that combined aesthetic research, ideology and militancy.
Masi exhibits artworks in dialogue with the coeval experiences of the Roman Gruppo Uno and the programmed art, in which he breaks down, dissects, organizes the surface into segments and spokes, enlarges and shrinks spatial rhythms into a sum of grids. The virtual perspectives originated by the obsessive iteration of small rectangular shapes tell in symbolic form a space in deep crisis and reveal the hidden structures beyond the surface.
The artist's interest in the surface remains constant throughout his long activity: the materials and structures also refer to a subtle analysis of the urban context, reconnect a mental and technical work to an inner condition of relationship with history, with his own city, with his own existential reality.
The exhibition project entitled Paolo Masi. Structures 1965-2021 partly reconstructs the exhibition at the Galleria Aquilone and the subsequent developments of this research, up to the most recent works created in 2021 on the occasion of the exhibition Paolo Masi. From hands to hands.