Tiziana Cordani - Gianfranco Paulli Sculptor

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Tiziana Cordani

IN THE WORLD > CRITIC

Exhibition

“Harmonies of reality”

Sculture di Gianfranco Paulli

Critic text of Professor Tiziana Cordani

(Art Critic)

Cremona, September 2006

In the fog of early morning lingers a shadow, it curves along the handle-bars of an old bicycle, from Seresina toward Soncino, the beautiful towering chatelaine world rises in the Cremona countryside: a slender boy, with a few books tied to his bike rack, energetically pedals while the first misty light of day rises, that boy’s name is Gianfranco - Gianfranco Paulli.

This is the way that every Saturday and Sunday morning, Gianfranco Paulli went to Castello’s art school in Soncino, where Maestro Enea Ferrari held his lessons and where he could perfect his drawings and his practical ideas which he acquired in the workshop of the great Sorinese sculptor, Leone Lodi, who had taken him on as apprentice because he had a dream and wanted at all costs for it to come true: he wanted to be a sculptor, to be a great Maestro like Lodi and to become famous. That dream is now a reality, Gianfranco Paulli is currently one of the most prominent Italian names in the international artistic scene, thanks to a constant work and an extraordinary tenacity which has led him to know all the secrets of plastic arts and sculpture through which he has magnificently developed a passion which was born at a tender young age.

The trade of marble mason was the family trade, an antique trade, that of the “marmorini”, expert collaborators to the sculptors, able to transmit a large amount of understanding to young apprentices and the young Paulli had a deep desire to learn, his hands pursued marble and clay, felt the material and his desire to work was never satiated.

So is yet today the sculptor from Cremona, for whom the assiduous work of accomplishment gives pace to that which is necessary for planning new works, the major part of which has monumental dimensions and adorns piazzas, buildings and churches both in Italy and around the world, while the other part is excellently placed in very prestigious private collections, such as that of Principi Grimaldi in Monaco or in international institutions which bring honour to the society, such as the Gorbachev Foundation or the one receiving Nobel Peace Prizes. The art of this our artist, actually, speaks an absolutely universal language, which every person appreciates regardless of their culture or training background, and has its own aesthetic reasons in classic Greek-Roman art and draws his themes from subjects tied to the reality of the object world, universally recognisable as part of the individual experience that characterizes it.

In the bronze sculpture, actually, as well as that of marble, some fundamental characters of the Paullian art distinguish themselves: the search for global harmony, the elegance of the forms, the strength of the plastic masses, the balance between the parts, the expressiveness of the stances. To reach such a high quality standard in the realization of works implies a constant labour, a strong planning and constructive commitment, and a precise knowledge of the actions necessary for reaching both technical and content perfection. The method of the sculptor from Cremona is that of maximum attention given both to the elaboration of the language of plastic art as well as in the choice of materials which he knows so well and with which he has experimented for so long, succeeding in understanding each characteristic: clay is one of his favourite materials, malleable and ductile, it lends itself perfectly to the initial models, to impression works, almost sculpted outlines that the artist prepares for studio work, to fix a movement, a face, a particular expression; bronze and marble are, rather, the main materials through which Paulli’s sculpting, which is begun and develops inside the furrow of tradition, and recites the continuity of today, better yet, expresses its strength, bringing out dynamic and light and shade effect vibrations. At times it seems that the sculptor doesn’t apply his own rule to the material, submitting it to his own project, but that this material itself will induce the artist to choices that will obligate him to a direction in the essence and the peculiarity itself of the material will emerge. The artist from Cremona is very well aware of this last aspect, who with great skill feels and sees, inside a block of marble, inside the plastic substance of bronze, the immense, expressive potentials gathered there, choosing for each work the most consistent and best suited material. Every Gianfranco Paulli statue, nevertheless, possesses a content and stylistic peculiarity that individualizes it among the sisters, accentuating in one - grace, in another - strength in one – motion and in another – contemplative quiet, neither being equal to the other but in the similarity of the language, in the elegance of the form, and in the substantial understanding of the constructive plans, particularly in the common poetics from which each one is inspired. Such poetics have deep roots, the first ones easily and immediately characterized in a robust classicism with remote origins in the Mediterranean area and which, through the great sculptures of the Renaissance, which also emerge in Paulli, particularly that of Michelangelo (don’t forget that our artist is among the restoration Maestros of the works of the Vatican), but also of Riciio, of Pisanello and of Mantenga, more than anything for the metal works, gets its strength from a new dynamism and assumes connotations of dramatic intensity. From the nineteenth-century experience, rather, particularly of plastic arts and of great Impressionists and truthful sculpture from Lombardy and Naples, derives a modern dissolution of light levels, an nervous frame and a wealth of expressive accents which open the way to a modern modulisation of language, not ignoring the tension of a Martini, but re-elaborates it into the dynamic and severely full dimension of a Lodi, an antique Maestro, enriching them with original accents in the warm drafting of the chiaroscuro, in the dynamic enlarged curvilinear motions, in the calm circumspect or in the fervent reality which emphasises the human consistency of relationships, both spiritual and sentimental, between and of the subjects. In Paulli, therefore, you can now observe the yield of an absolute serenity and now a quivering emotional drive; to the wise observer however, it will not escape how one is the product of a decantation of the suffering of meditation, which is added to the Sacred experience, while the other carries the marks of a totally human passion, the fruit of generous impetuses. Even a few sculptors dedicated to animals feel this mark in certain ways, heroic, marked by a classic enthusiasm and equally expressive.

If in the secular world sculptures the author is free from ties of the subject to give body, both in marble and in bronze, to a search for the ideal Beauty, particularly in feminine figures which play a large part in the Paulliana production, that nevertheless, this doesn’t mean the renunciation of a continuous elaboration in terms of original interpretations of the experience progress, so Paulli’s women, mothers, and ballerinas distinguish themselves by a sinuous linearity of the forms, by a Canovian elegance of the surfaces, by an essential by precise outcome of the effects of the lights and shadows on the bodies, by an acute sensitivity to the material’s native chromatics, as each marble has its own colours, each patina of the bronze is own proportions, even Carrara’s pure white statuary has translucence which are understood and which the Maestro knows how to skilfully use.

This skill, a natural gift which the artist has perfected “in-house” and enriched with practice and experience, now gives a special touch to the works of the Maestro from Cremona, a touch which, in the images, truly renders the grand strength of individual characters which the sculptor captures in the works precious and even more meaningful.

There are, however, statues of a sacred or symbolic character, often of a monumental size, those in which Gianfranco Palli’s amazing technical ability as an essential support to a spiritual tension, wanting to make in the harmonic form of the classic lines, the tormented interest of the day without letting the lack of harmony of today’s values harm an ideal of balance, measure, Beauty - the very fruit of spiritual research and of overcoming human contingency. The supreme Beauty of the Creation seems, therefore, to reflect itself in the divine purity of the lines, in the perfect proportions, in the harmonic forms which the intense humanity of affections, the passionate warmth of emotions, the total Lombardy and Padana perception of a valiant manner, give body and robust consistency.

As rarely happens with such originality of results, in the sculpture and in the plastic art of Gianfranco Paulli co-exist the ideals of tradition and truth of contemporaneousness, the past and the present, fused from art into a new and original harmony which often finds in the allusion, the symbol, the metaphor, the means to express those emotions, those states of mind, those contributions of all figures that make even the most inert material vibrate with a new vitality and sensibility, giving it a breath of life and nobility of the purest spirit, so that it becomes a true work of art.

Tiziana Cordani