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

Veritable "shadow sculptures", these ghostly paintings created in situ from flasks, butterflies, skulls or books blackened by fire before being removed to leave their immaculate imprint on smoky walls are as reminiscent of the diaphanous still lifes of Giorgio Morandi (with whom he may have rubbed shoulders at a very early age) as they are of antique (or futuristic?) Vanities.

Claudio Parmiggiani's soot paintings are disturbing memento mori and trace works, giving us food for thought on the theme of disappearance, absence and emptiness: "There is no more room for any painting, and the only possible experience is that of emptiness, a flame lit within us to illuminate this infinite void, which alone makes us alive," explains the painter-poet.

Parmiggiani never ceases to probe this "void made of infinity" in his works of shadows and prints: "An environment of shadows, shadows of canvases peeled away from the walls, shadows of shadows, as if we were seeing behind a veil another veiled reality [...] and so on, losing ourselves ad infinitum, in search of an image and, through this image, the desire to glimpse ourselves. "
1 Born in 1943 in Italy's Emilia-Romagna region, Claudio Parmiggiani is associated with the Arte povera movement. In the 1970s, he began his Delocazioni series, "negatives" resulting from the removal of smoky objects, which earned him the nickname "genius of the non-place".

" CLAUDIO PARMIGGIANI "
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