Curated by Flaminio Gualdoni

“I do not limit myself only to the intellectual level, but I concentrate on the physical one, that is, the hand at a certain point refuses to make a gesture that it has made too many times and I have to discover a different one, a different way of dealing with the surface, of dealing with painting.” Paolo Masi

On the day of his 80th birthday, 11 May 2013, Paolo Masi is inaugurating an extensive solo exhibition that retraces some of the milestones in his history and documents his fervid recent season.

Some large installations of today, both published and unpublished, intersect with historical cycles such as the Cartoni [Cardboards], Tessiture [Weaving], and Dripping, which since the 1970s have seen him as the protagonist of an analytically aggressive and poetically visionary relationship with the space of seeing.

During the exhibition, a monographic volume will be presented, introduced by an essay by Flaminio Gualdoni and full of testimonies by the artist, published by Gli Ori, which reconstructs Masi's entire long operative history, from the overcoming of informal culture to his role as founder and protagonist of certain events that have made Florence an active pole of international contemporary practice: from the F/Uno group in the 1960s to spaces of autonomous elaboration and proposal such as Zona and Base.

Gualdoni writes: “The strings pull taut over the wall as though to track grandiose Liciniani archipaintings, the aluminium bars, the plexiglas pieces, carriers of their own colors, the mirrors, the luminous rays of artifice; primarily, all highlight the formative process, the action itself and its role as modifier, from within fruition and from within the very conception of place.”