Frittelli arte contemporanea is pleased to present the exhibition Paolo Masi. Dalle mani alle mani [From the hands to the hands], curated by Flaminio Gualdoni. 

On display will be the artist's most recent works, an unpublished series of large cardboards made in 2021, and some works from the 1970s. The title, suggested by the artist, is linked to a text/intervention he wrote on the occasion of his participation in the 1978 Venice Art Biennial, in which he stated:

“History is manual skill. 
Passage of hand to hand, to hands.
History is accumulation of the passage of hands to hands. 
History is sedimentation of signal-signs, stratified, present, contemporary.”

Masi has gone back to reworking the sign vocabulary developed since the 1960s: on the one hand, the search for a structure that is an intermediary between surface and reality, and on the other, the intuition that the artistic gesture has historical and social relevance, it has the property of involvement, being a bridge between past, present and utopia.

The artist, at the age of 89, takes up the legacy of the past (the first exhibitions presenting works on cardboard date back to 1974), reusing a medium that in its poverty is a representation of the urban landscape, a continuous source of reflection and inspiration. Linearizations, incisions and coloring alternate with perforations and reframing, take possession of the space of the surface, modifying its pre-existing state in order to restore new possible readings.