Paolo Del Giudice

…Paolo Del Giudice is a painter who loves and suffers the frailness of existence. Looking at his paintings, one has the impression of seeing various natural and artistic forms appear out of nowhere. These forms never become paralyzed in definite certainties or invulnerable consistency.On the contrary, they vibrate and struggle with the nothingness that surrounds them. One could say that these images, rather than appearing out of nothingness, often seem to be on the verge of disappearing at times. They have the melancholy of a greeting on the quayside of time.

It may be a loosing battle from the start, but it is our battle and we must not avoid it. It is impossible to accept the fact that things come to an end without a final embrace, not only as an ultimate gesture of fondness, but in an effort to preserve, for a moment longer, that which is destined to vanish. This is why I say that Del Giudice’s painting has, undoubtedly, a civil impetus. Although Del Giudice could let these forms free, just as the autumn tree releases its leaves into the wind, a poetic and civil sense compels him to hold on to them as long as possible before letting them go. 

 His portraits of the masters of literature are not only a homage to these intense faces of intelligence and sensitivity but also an attempt to show the public or society some of its bright intellectual lights, masters who are often forgotten or banished to the dust of university or academic research. Consequently, this exhibition is like a generous ark travelling on the muddy waters of contemporary Italy, while within its belly lay fragments of the past: ruins and Baroque churches, unfamiliar landscapes, no-name city outskirts and the everyday means of transportation pertaining to the hard life: everything deemed worthy of the effort of preserving for their beauty and timorous humanity. 

And among these images, the power of which resides in their fragility, the lean face of Pier Paolo Pasolini appears almost as a protective deity. The poet from Friuli who lived in Rome and was on the whole Italian, was the fiercest speaker in support of difference and the first to denounce the menace threatening our country: the indistinctiveness, the levelling-out, the criminal act of making a spectacle out of everything, actions that even out and cancel everything. He was a prophet and a Cassandra. He saw what others didn’t want to see: a complete loss of intensity and even the tiniest element of purity. He is the ghost commander of this bastion, charged with a hope that doesn’t give up.

He is a corsair who doesn’t tire of fighting against the apparatus of mediocrity. And for a short time, at least the time it takes to admire these images, we are his crew as we travel with him and with Paolo Del Giudice across the beauty, freshness and truth of what remains of a country almost completely drained dry.

Marco Lodoli – from the catalogue of the exibition “Viaggio in Italia” Spoleto, Venezia, Bassano del Grappa, 2006 – 2007