“[…] to create psychological places… mental places. Places that have a voice, a heart that beats in the thickness of the walls”: such is the goal pursued by Claudio Parmiggiani 1 with his series of Delocazioni, works of smoke and soot.

True "shadow sculptures", these ghostly paintings made in situ from bottles, butterflies, skulls or books blackened by fire before being removed to leave their immaculate imprint on the smoke-filled walls evoke as much the diaphanous still lifes of Giorgio Morandi (whom he was able to meet at a very young age) as ancient (or futuristic?) Vanitas.

Disturbing memento mori, works-traces, Claudio Parmiggiani's soot paintings give us pause to reflect on the theme of disappearance, absence and emptiness: "There is no longer room for any painting, and the only possible experience is that of emptiness, a flame lit within us to illuminate this void made of infinity which alone makes us live," explains the painter-poet.

“This void made of infinity,” he constantly probes it in his works of shadows and imprints – “An environment of shadows, of shadows of canvases peeled from the walls, of shadows of shadows, as if one were seeing behind a veil another veiled reality […] and so on, losing oneself to infinity, in search of an image and, through this image, the desire to perceive oneself.”
1 Born in 1943 in Italy, in the Emilia-Romagna region, Claudio Parmiggiani is associated with the Arte Povera movement. It was in the 1970s that he began his series of Delocazioni, “negatives” resulting from the removal of smoke-covered objects, which earned him the nickname “genius of the non-place”.

“CLAUDIO PARMIGGIANI”
TORNABUONI ART
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