Flavio Paolucci's exhibition, which opens the renovated exhibition spaces of Casa Cavalier Pellanda, is a retrospective documenting the work of a leading figure in Swiss art.

Inaugurating the renovated exhibition spaces of Casa Cavalier Pellanda, after the major renovations to which it has undergone in recent years, is an exhibition by Flavio Paolucci, an artist born in Torre in 1934, who for more than sixty years has resided in the municipality of Biasca, where in 1965, at the northern edge of the village, near the mouth of the Blenio Valley, he built his house-atelier.
The exhibition, a retrospective documenting Paolucci's entire artistic career, is not only a tribute to one of the main figures in contemporary Ticino art on the occasion of his 90th birthday but also represents the first opportunity to admire the artist's work in the place where his roots lie.
Promoted by the City of Biasca and entrusted to the curatorship of Elio Schenini, the exhibition is in fact the first to present Paolucci's work in the territory where he spent most of his life. Not only that, the exhibition is also the first in an institutional space in Ticino since the major retrospective organized in 2014 by the Museo Cantonale d'arte on the occasion of the artist's 80th birthday. Since then, Paolucci's research has never stopped but has been enriched by a large number of works, a sign of his inexhaustible creativity, as is also documented in the exhibition itinerary, in which there are many works created in the last decade.
While offering a comprehensive look at his work, the exhibition has no ambitions of anthological exhaustiveness, but rather aims to bring the public closer to the poetics of an artist who represents an extremely singular and autonomous voice in the Swiss art scene. The works on display, about forty in number, including sculptures, collages and paintings, have in fact been chosen above all for their ability to fit in and dialogue with the historically characterized spaces of this ancient Renaissance building and to highlight the close link they have with the territorial context to which the artist has remained anchored with great consistency but without any nostalgic spirit, anticipating reflections on the relationship that binds man and nature of great topicality today.
The direct and daily relationship with the natural environment and with the rural Alpine world, which in these places of often extreme conditions has for centuries built its own possibility of inhabiting the land with a sense of measure and balance, are essential in Flavio Paolucci's work. Indeed, it is during his walks through the forests of Biasca and the Blenio Valley that the artist gathers the cues for his works. A stone, a house, a ruin, a branch, a leaf, an atmospheric situation, these are the starting points of an aesthetic experience that in the atelier is then distilled through a long and meditated process of formal elaboration based on simplification and reduction to the essential from which come works that have the poetic conciseness of visual haiku.
On the occasion of the exhibition, a publication has been produced by Sottoscala editions in Bellinzona in which images of Paolucci's works dialogue with a series of texts expressly created for the occasion by writers Fabio Andina and Noëmi Lerch, both residents of the Blenio Valley.


Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.