Patrizio Di Massimo | Self-Portraits

Certainly pleasant & equally pleasurable; a smile for everyone. Patrizio di Massimo, class of 1983, "bruno" like all the characters in his paintings, he defines himself as a painter & also knows the history art perfectly. His references are Grosz e Dix, Carrà e De Chirico as well as Savinio e Casorati; Goya & Füssli & in no particular order we can add Schad, Balthus, Klossowski, Malevich & Picabia. Condo, then Duwenhögger together with Hockney & Currin. Women painters: Kahlo, Lassnig & contemporary Olowska.

Di Massimo's artworks are sometimes painted with recurring scenes & always animated by real hands & feet that come out naked from the interstices suggesting an intricate architectural composition of bodies underneath. & then the curtains that protrude from blind walls & the wallpapers that cover the entire room & serve as solemn backdrops for his drawings.

These are images, motifs, stylistic features, & iconographies that constantly return as in a mise-en-abyme that finds an ideal vanishing point or crystallisation in the canvases, the place where the subjects sediment & acquire body, thickness, volume, presence & history. This process has accelerated in the last decade. Classic themes alternate with more domestic & erotic portraits. The complexions remain pale, almost cadaverous, with forced veils of pink on the cheeks. Masks often have thickened features, swollen bodies, prominent noses & squinted eyes.

Breasts & buttocks do not respond to the laws of gravity & look upwards. There is an abstention from time & space defined by a few emblematic elements. There is always him, Patrizio, often with her, Nicoletta, his partner, who in "Self Portrait as a model" is replacing him behind the canvas while he poses for her. He often appears naked, but from behind or in profile, otherwise, he is completely covered, whether by armour or a white sheet. There is a mystery, emotion, fragility in the complacency of passing time. There is something rotten, as in the perfume "Odore di Santità" created in 2015 & combined with two identical canvases. There is beauty combined with the grotesque. Fragility is also a gift & decay is not necessarily a fault. It is the body driven by sudden acceleration. Hypertrophy, personal experience, perhaps, an accident, a fall, an unexpected event, a revelation.

L’Uomo Vogue, October 2017, Italian source reworked