More than fifty years after his participation in the now historic urban art exhibition Intervention on the city and the landscape held in 1970 in Zafferana Etnea, Paolo Masi returns to Catania with a solo exhibition at Galleria Massimo Ligreggi: through a selection of key works belonging to the various phases of his artistic career, from the early 1960s to the present day, the exhibition sheds light on the rigorous and analytical attitude that have marked the work of one of the protagonists of the Italian neo-avant-garde of the 20th century. An animator of the Florentine art scene, Paolo Masi after a brief but incisive season linked to the experience of the Informal movement, recovered the lesson of the first avant-gardes – Suprematism, De Stijl and Bauhaus in primis – to launch a highly original research on the links between painting, space and light, conceived as dynamic and variable elements in the process of human perception. In Masi’s work, the surface of the painting becomes a field of forces in tension, in which the colour signs reshape the space in line with changing directions, entering into a very close relationship with the external environment and, above all, with the optical-perceptual experience of the observer. Lara Vinca-Masini, one of the first and most lucid interpreters of Masi’s art, has spoken of “a continuous dilation in rhythmic-dynamic terms”, emphasising the temporal and contingent nature of his works. Such aspects are present in all the works on display in the exhibition: from the refined tempera on paper paintings of 1962- where the gestural movement opens up to the new symbols of modern civilisation (road signs, arrows, numbers)- to the labyrinthine interweaving of the works of the 1980s; from the constructivist-style grid-prints of the 1990s, to the transparent spray-painted plastic surfaces of the early 2000s, right up to the large installation composed of thirty-one Plexiglas rulers, designed in 2013 for the rooms of the Frittelli Gallery in Florence and redesigned specifically for the spaces of the Ligreggi Gallery. The choice of the ruler is not random: since it is considered to be the instrument of measurement par excellence, at the basis of artistic and architectural drawing, Masi assumed it to be as a symbol of painting itself, as in the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, Carlo Carrà and later in those of Tano Festa. It has a metonymic value. Although since the 1960s the artist has been involved in a process of breaking down the boundaries of the painting and has committed himself to intense experimentation with extra-artistic materials (i.e. the Tessiture or the Cartoni of the 1970s), his work remains exquisitely pictorial. But Masi’s work is not an operation of recovery of modernist painting, in the meaning given to this term by Clement Greenberg: he rethought his painting according to new canons, conceived to be experienced phenomenologically and ready to accept the contingency of real space and time. Masi’s painting confronts the everydayness of life and the immanence of human perception.

Raffaella Perna