Calzolari, Pier Paolo | Artist Overview

A leading figure in the postwar Arte Povera movement, Pier Paolo Calzolari (b. 1943; Bologna, Italy) is renowned for the material inventiveness and formal originality of his expansive, genre-defying practice. Working with equal fluency in painting, sculpture, installation, and performance, Calzolari’s work embraces a fascination with the alchemical while examining the potential of light, the essence of memory, and the poetic character of the natural world and the urban environment.

Calzolari’s highly charged, contemplative creations revolve around concerns of light, matter, and space. The artist spent much of his youth in Venice, and the city’s particular light—its reflection on the marble and mosaics—had a profound influence on his work. In 1965, he joined four other artists in founding Studio Bentivoglio in Bologna, Italy. Against the backdrop of postwar political and economic instability, the artists of Studio Bentivoglio sought new ways of making art. Working with simple, commonplace materials—as well as performance and happenings—the Studio Bentivoglio artists critiqued both the technologization and industrialization of modern society and the commercialization of art itself. One of the youngest artists of the movement, Calzolari has, throughout his career, continued to build upon the ethos of Arte Povera, a name coined by curator and critic Germano Celant. Calzolari’s ongoing interest in “poor” materials, in performance, in matter and transience, in light and beauty have come to define his oeuvre.

Calzolari’s materials are elemental and frequently organic—fire, salt, lead, tobacco, moss, burnt wood, oyster shells, tobacco leaves, felt, neon, and butter. While his materials may be poor, it is “...an impoverishment brimming with spiritual insight and celestial visions,” curator Massimiliano Gioni writes. Fascinated with the elemental and the alchemical, Calzolari engages extreme natural elements—including both fire and frost—among his media of choice, while continuing to experiment with the commonplace materials and signature motifs that came out of Arte Povera. While many of his peers frequently embrace an avant-garde rejection of the cultural past, Calzolari continually employs his inventive materials to engage in a deliberate dialogue with art history, often making reference to themes and motifs found in Byzantine, Renaissance, and Baroque art. Now in his late 70s, Calzolari is still working, primarily as a painter; he is, as critic Will Heinrich writes, “the rare conceptual artist whose paintings really look like paintings.” In recent work, he uses organic materials—salt, lead, and frost, most notably—to build texture and depth within contemplative and atmospheric compositions that explore themes of life, death, and, ultimately, regeneration—a potent and hopeful reflection on the cyclical state of nature.

The nine panels of Calzolari’s Untitled (2022) represent the totality of his recent material experimentation. Onto the surface of each of the pigmented and salt-strewn panels, Calzolari attaches a small object—a rose petal, a leaf, a candle sitting with a seashell, a small blue orb, a miniature globe—providing a focus for contemplation within the surrounding textures and colors. In his recent work, Calzolari engages not only with material, but also with color and light—ultimately producing compositions that are both highly charged and contemplative. With this work, Calzolari sheds a new light onto his painting practice, combining traditions deeply embedded in art history with the material concerns of Arte Povera, collapsing temporalities on the canvas, and creating a meditation on memory.

The shoe prints embedded within the surface of Untitled (2021) are a recurring motif in Calzolari’s work. Calzo, in Italian, means “shoe”—calzolari are shoemakers. The shoe, for the artist, is not only a reference to his family name, but also a reference to the way he views himself and his work. Calzolari understands himself as an artisan—like a cobbler—and the shoe is a symbol of the humble nature of his chosen materials.

Growing up in Venice, Calzolari was endlessly fascinated by the city’s unique light—the way the sun shines on the city’s marble buildings, producing an astonishing shade of white that could never be replicated with paint. Always searching for a way to produce that same brilliant white in his art, Calzolari began working with frost—and his ongoing experimentation with the material would become a defining element of his practice. To produce his signature frost installations, Calzolari connects an old refrigerator unit to the surface of the work using copper wires. When activated, the work is blanketed in a thin layer of pure, brilliant white frost.

Turning away from the monochrome— with a renewed interest in rich, saturated colors—Calzolari completed several Rideau paintings in the mid- 1980s. From 1982–1984, Calzolari lived in Vienna, on a street running along a canal on the Danube River. There he observed the effects of light on the iridescent surface of the river— reminiscent of, yet distinct from—the light reflecting off the Venetian canals of his childhood. Inspired by the effects of light in Vienna, Calzolari embraces in these works pure expressionism, emotion, and color.

Calzolari’s lead works exexmplify his longstanding interest in the material world, in humble materials, and in the alchemical. While lead, by its very nature, is resistent to corrosion, Calzolari nevertheless exposes it to the elements, allowing them to strip away the smooth surface of the metal. These works, like Untitled (1979), seem to beg the question, as Massimiliano Gioni puts it, “How does one reach enlightenment by way of dull, heavy materials such as lead?”