Frittelli arte contemporanea opens the new exhibition season with a solo show by Paolo Masi, curated by Marco Meneguzzo, who has selected works from the last decade.

The exhibition moves within the dual polarity of “material” colors reflecting their own light and forms heterogeneously identifiable in the urban cultural depth in which the artist delves.

From the experiences of Informal painting and concrete abstractionism (to which he adheres through his own free interpretation) Paolo Masi moves on to an articulate and diversified activity on a technical-logistical level: he interrogates the possibilities of art by contemplating matter and transforming it. In the 1960s he tends towards an emblematic expression of today's life by relating the signs in a two-dimensional classification, enclosing them in precise dimensions, in colors of non-naturalistic extraction, achieving an “analytical deconstruction of the presence of color”, he searches for a three-dimensionality on canvas through a particular declination of the geometric grid. The repetition of forms alludes to mechanical work, to the reiteration of gestures, to a veritable programmatic graphicism intended as a sign of an order that one wants to reconstitute in its entirety, also reconnecting with Russian Constructivism and Bauhaus, which were the first to experiment with industrial application in art. During this period, he participated in aesthetic research groups such as Centro F Uno, which managed to transgress “the situation of cultural insularity in which the city of Florence was operating, a city living in a particular situation of freezing and conjugation to the remote past.”

He then approached the contextual analytical-reductive experiences, breaking down and reorganizing on the floor and against the walls aluminium rods, mirrors, wires and small colored plexiglas, which also extended the rhythmicity of space-color to the third dimension. 
The next phase coincides with the return to two-dimensionality through the project Rilevamenti esterni - conferme interne [External findings - internal confirmations] (1974-1976), an elaboration that Paolo Masi develops from the work begun in New York in 1974 of Polaroids of manhole covers, walls and floors. The findings, which refer to a subtle analysis of the urban context, constitute a link between material work and the relationship with history, with their own existential reality. The Tessiture [Weavings] and the cardboards, on which he intervenes by modifying (piercing and cutting) the original structure, are proof of the presence of  “play understood as creativity and at the same time as social unease”.

In the second half of the 1970s, the sensitive accentuation is insurgent, as can be seen in the analytical wall of material, sensitive, optic-tactile occasions, proposed at the 1978 Venice Biennial: an example of conceptual transit towards perceptive phenomenology.

In the 1980s, he continued his analytical research on painting and color, perceived as materiality capable of absorbing or reflecting light. The colors are called upon to perceive the changing optical vibrations, as the desire to investigate the perceptive legibility of the spectator is evident.

In the 1990s, he recovered a relationship of identification and rediscovery of his own territory through the historical and geometric-rational aspects that characterize the city of Florence, as can be seen in the 1993 intervention, Rullopittura [Rollerpaint], in which Paolo Masi reconnected with historical stratification and the signs it produces. In these years, the paint surface is subdivided by the artist into horizontal bands of color, bands of pigment spread with different techniques.

The canvases of the latest Particelle=Immagine [Particles=Image] series are furrowed by constellations of forms generated and confirmed by the desire to implement an interaction between the path of creation of forms and that of their differentiation within the work itself. The square cardboards become supports that receive holes and engravings; the plexiglas rounds of the Invaders series, the result of the superimposition of several layers of pictorial film, incorporate almost primordial signs. The unprecedented installation of threads on the wall once again shows the artist's attempt to create perceptive experiences that strike the visitor's imagination. Paolo Masi, narrator, thus presents and confirms the undisputed protagonists of his artistic tale: gesture, color, sign.

The event adheres to the Day of the Contemporary called by AMACI.