• Paolo Chiasera

màn

In Indo-Germanic languages, ‘màn’ means to think, know, understand, measure.
Starting from the root ‘màn’, you can build the word ‘mente’ (mind) and in general all of the words related to the idea of remaining. Thanks to this we think that the mind is a stable and everlasting matter.

An art exhibition is first and foremost a mental vision, a concept that links the works together and attempts to give a meaningful structure to the world through them. It is therefore the visual content of an insight that the artist conveys through the medium of painting, among other means, and its capacity to translate thought. Starting from this observation, Paolo Chiasera suggests extending the range of painting genres to include curatorial practices, translating the content of the exhibition into the code of painting – into an ‘Exhibition Painting’ – a show that operates within the framework of representation.
Like any exhibition, it includes works by various artists. But, by focusing on the Aristotelic meaning of concept – understood as knowledge of what is identical among a variety of things – it fruitfully sets itself apart from various artistic experiments of Appropriation and Re-appropriation art.

The freedom of expression offered by the mediation of painting is what unshackles the exhibition and its concept from all limitations, so that it can reconstruct itself within the sphere of the canvas as a realm of imagination and emancipation, as a proposition that the viewer’s mind is invited to tackle, bringing the experience of the show to completion on its own. Through images, the Exhibition Painting thus seems to take Lawrence Weiner’s ideas about the role of the viewer to a radical extreme, combining them with the cognitive explorations of Aby Warburg’s Atlas and further complicating the unstable relationship that exists between language and its context, between nature and culture, between similarity and simile.

Istante fermati, sei bello!, Madonna della Scodella and Melancholia are the titles of the three exhibition paintings that have been specially produced for this third solo show of Paolo Chiasera at Francesca Minini.