By Karine Marcelle Arneodo
Olaias, November 26, 2025
Translated from Italian by Joëlle Naïm
There comes a point, in the itinerary of an artist, where geography ceases to be a simple physical coordinate to become a stratification of time. Pier Paolo Calzolari’s landing in Lisbon in 2016 does not mark only a shift in space but a decisive inner synthesis. Confronting that Atlantic light, white and absolute, that breaks on the Mar da Palha, the eye does not only encounter a new landscape but awakes to shapes and sensations that seemed sedimented.
Why Saudades in plural? Because in the series of 21 canvas made by the artist in the early months of his stay in Ulysses' city, resounds not a single voice but a true polyphony of wide memories which intertwine, contaminate and melt into a chorus of shimmering resonances. This is the golden saudade of the Venice mother water meeting courtly saudade of the Urbino stones. This is not the feeling of lack but of a dazzling co-presence: the various seasons of the mind which all of a sudden meet on the surface of the canvas.
It all stems from a bewilderment: a dazzle. The eye, that in the course of time was disciplined by the Marches hills, building alters of silence and Valori Plastici, now finds itself exposed to a luminous vibration that does not require any longer to be ordered, but only welcomed and listened to. Lisbon does not allow stasis; its light is a wind that pervades matter. It is a transparency through which “resurgences” emerge.
Venice then reemerges. But not the city of the canals; it is the tonal and atmospheric essence of the formative years. This pale pink, this pearly white that vibrates in the tempera al latte of the new works, this is not then pigment, this is liquid memory. As if the brick of the Venitian palaces had reappeared, illuminated and purified by the Tagus waters. The technical skill that generated the monastic whiteness of the architectonic structure, inherent in the Urbino series Still Lifes of the mid2000s, acts by rebounds, almost as if it would evaporate, becomes the ghost of a light which envelops the objects rather than define them.
Yet, beneath this chromatic softness, still lingers, subtly, the Urbino tension. The Urbino saudade is the call of the absolute, geometry structuring the world. But in Lisbon this geometry loosens, loses its rigidity to become like clouds. The objects that live in these canvases—hanging thread, hardly stuck gauze, buttons, little wooden spheres held by a thin steel wirle, fans—are no longer elements of the “still lifes," anchored by the leaden gravity of the priestly thought. They have lost their specific weight to become light as a breath. They are fragments of an existence that float in a liberated space. If in the heights of Urbino silence was “of frost," a crystal that stopped time in a perfect shape, in the Lisbon sun, ice has become water. The works are no longer silent, enclosed within a golden sacredness; they have become quiet. And quietness is the most delicate touch of sound: it is the whisper of the undertow beating the shore, the rustle of the wind that lifts from time to time the gauze.
Calzolari, with this “naked” painting, no longer seeks to impose a shape to the matter. It is the matter itself which passes through him. Saudades as intertwined memories: the echo of the lagoon water which rumbles and is lost into the wide ocean, the intellectual rigor that surrenders to the gentle reverberated recollections. These 21 canvases are soulscapes where any boundary between an inside and an outside of time vanishes. The testimony of the eye, pervaded by the Lisbon clarity, that transforms its memories into presence, not painting a tale but a breath. And almost as if there were a curtain dropping on its “small” dramas skillfully veiled with these tempere al latte, we will not be surprised to encounter, in the twenty-first picture, an all-black work, deep, clear-cut and decisive: the tribute paid by the artist to the absence that permits his white-pink visions to emerge, by contrast.
By Karine Marcelle ArneodoOlaias, November 26, 2025Translated from Italian by Joëlle NaïmThere comes a point, in the itinerary of an artist, where geography ceases to be a simple physical coordinate to become a stratification of time. Pier Paolo Calzolari’s landing in Lisbon in 2016 does not mark only a shift in space but a decisive inner synthesis. Confronting that Atlantic light, white and absolute, that breaks on the Mar da Palha, the eye does not only encounter a new landscape but awakes to shapes and sensations that seemed sedimented.Why Saudades in plural? Because in the series of 21 canvas made by the artist in the early months of his stay in Ulysses' city, resounds not a single voice but a true polyphony of wide memories which intertwine, contaminate and melt into a chorus of shimmering resonances. This is the golden saudade of the Venice mother water meeting courtly saudade of the Urbino stones. This is not the feeling of lack but of a dazzling co-presence: the various seasons of the mind which all of a sudden meet on the surface of the canvas.It all stems from a bewilderment: a dazzle. The eye, that in the course of time was disciplined by the Marches hills, building alters of silence and Valori Plastici, now finds itself exposed to a luminous vibration that does not require any longer to be ordered, but only welcomed and listened to. Lisbon does not allow stasis; its light is a wind that pervades matter. It is a transparency through which “resurgences” emerge.Venice then reemerges. But not the city of the canals; it is the tonal and atmospheric essence of the formative years. This pale pink, this pearly white that vibrates in the tempera al latte of the new works, this is not then pigment, this is liquid memory. As if the brick of the Venitian palaces had reappeared, illuminated and purified by the Tagus waters. The technical skill that generated the monastic whiteness of the architectonic structure, inherent in the Urbino series Still Lifes of the mid2000s, acts by rebounds, almost as if it would evaporate, becomes the ghost of a light which envelops the objects rather than define them.Yet, beneath this chromatic softness, still lingers, subtly, the Urbino tension. The Urbino saudade is the call of the absolute, geometry structuring the world. But in Lisbon this geometry loosens, loses its rigidity to become like clouds. The objects that live in these canvases—hanging thread, hardly stuck gauze, buttons, little wooden spheres held by a thin steel wirle, fans—are no longer elements of the “still lifes," anchored by the leaden gravity of the priestly thought. They have lost their specific weight to become light as a breath. They are fragments of an existence that float in a liberated space. If in the heights of Urbino silence was “of frost," a crystal that stopped time in a perfect shape, in the Lisbon sun, ice has become water. The works are no longer silent, enclosed within a golden sacredness; they have become quiet. And quietness is the most delicate touch of sound: it is the whisper of the undertow beating the shore, the rustle of the wind that lifts from time to time the gauze.Calzolari, with this “naked” painting, no longer seeks to impose a shape to the matter. It is the matter itself which passes through him. Saudades as intertwined memories: the echo of the lagoon water which rumbles and is lost into the wide ocean, the intellectual rigor that surrenders to the gentle reverberated recollections. These 21 canvases are soulscapes where any boundary between an inside and an outside of time vanishes. The testimony of the eye, pervaded by the Lisbon clarity, that transforms its memories into presence, not painting a tale but a breath. And almost as if there were a curtain dropping on its “small” dramas skillfully veiled with these tempere al latte, we will not be surprised to encounter, in the twenty-first picture, an all-black work, deep, clear-cut and decisive: the tribute paid by the artist to the absence that permits his white-pink visions to emerge, by contrast.