Paolo Quaresima

The poetics of things is Paolo Quaresima's peculiarity, a skilful painter capable to portray our everyday life under a midday-like light. Just like Giorgio Morandi spent his whole life portraying simple bottles and vases until he achieved a perfect combination of lines and colours, Paolo Quaresima keeps painting still lives that bring out a more lyrical and dreamlike aspect than the ones of the Bolognese master. However, the intensity, the metaphysical tension, the desire to depict the truth of things, also the simplest ones, by making them shake in the wait for a miracle, are the same. Heidegger, the philosopher, had already foreseen that painting serves the purpose to manifest the being, that is, to reveal the being of things, their profound way to exist and stand before us, and the artist's task is to describe things beyond the awareness of things. Here lies the beauty of a painting that is aware and happy to reveal the truth, and yet it does not disdain the almost theatrical mise-en-scène of the surrounding world, which exists even without us: the “unspeaking things”, quoting Borges, “They’ll long outlast our oblivion; And never know that we are gone”.