PAOLO VENTURA
Una città quasi infinita

War, identity, abandonment, memory, become a fairy tale for children, in an alienating atmosphere. Paolo Ventura’s magic realism is peopled by puppets moving inside small handmade, pastel-coloured theatre sets. His small narratives combine painting, collage and photography to produce a total work, like stills from a film or strips from an old comic strip. It is the scenario of a dream, which synthesises the complexity of the external world, imprinted in memory, with the inner psychological magma and encodes it in images with a strong symbolic content. The author himself, together with his family members, appears in this dreamlike scene, an actor in his own childish and dramatic reverie, a romantic experimenter in a work that amazes, at the same time, for its complexity and simplicity.

BIO

Paolo Ventura (Milan, 1968) is one of the most original Italian artists, known for his unique technique, which brings together photography, painting, illustration and set design. In the early 1990s, he attended the Brera Academy of Fine Arts and for the next ten years, he was a fashion, design and landscape photographer. He moved to New York and in a very small studio in Brooklyn began to build small dioramas inspired by World War II, which would become his signature style.

He has exhibited in galleries and museums all over the world and published numerous books. His work can be found in the Collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Phillips Collection in Washington, Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, MART – Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, MAXXI in Rome, and in numerous private collections.