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

Patrizio Di Massimo was born in Jesi, Italy in 1983, the artist lives & works in London. As a self-taught painter, he created a very distinctive style

Falling in love with Picasso, De Chirico & Dalí as an Italian teenager, now London-based Patrizio di Massimo creates seductive paintings that discover the beautiful & the grotesque. Describing himself as an obsessive painter, he speaks of his paintings as layered cemeteries of images that need to be destroyed to achieve the final result. Di Massimo’s paintings depict hidden or forbidden desires, allowing for a connection with the physical experience of the body.

Patrizio Di Massimo sets up a vocabulary with endless combinations of information & references ... from Renaissance painting, through Mannerism & the late nineteenth century French artists, to the icons of contemporary photography, to unidentified images found on the web, to an archive of personal drawings & photographs.

The artist works at an ever-present space-time junction, creating an imaginary world in which if he anachronistically seems to draw on a past tradition, he actually makes an ancient language current, bringing it back to our time, instilling new energy & a new vision into it with images relating to the personal & the universal, to the public & the private.

Images that have the challenging appeal of an advertisement, with their firm tone, vibrant colors, plentiful details, movement, story-telling.

Clad in clever irony & classic elegance, Patrizio Di Massimo’s paintings become paraphrases of a much larger world in which the artist includes friends, family, acquaintances & people close to him. His characters take shape, move, leave the studio & the mind of the artist to confront the real world — no longer a plain representation of themselves, but main actors & presences, the interpreters of their own life & defined identities. Masculine & feminine merge in the artist's practice, & the so-called 'gender roles' are constantly redefined, questioned & recoded.

The artist therefore represents himself, his self-portrait, in a multitude of works & in a continuous externalization of himself, aimed at a process of constant identity validation.

From Renaissance painting, through Mannerism & the late nineteenth century French artists, to the icons of contemporary photography, to unidentified images found on the web, to an archive of personal drawings & photographs

Patrizio Di Massimo | Endless Combinations of Information & References

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