Vittorio Sgarbi
The relationship between man and nature is a thin and sublime border.
They belong to each other, even if they are different in shape. Moreover, while the first is limited and abusive the second
one is immense and generous.
In the paintings of Paolo Rossetto they become one, inseparable and suggestive.
This idea can only take its origin from Ovid's myth of Daphne transformed into a laurel tree to escape the courtship of the
god Apollo, but the tension is completely new.
"In the moistness of a wild greeting/ feet becoming twisted briars / she feels and from them a trunk rising/ which her legs
on to the thighs / includes and of skin makes peel/ and where the flower of virginity rests/ an inviolable knot ties "
While these verses from Gabriele D'Annunzio, make clear all the wonder and terror of the nymph who observes the metamorphosis
of her own body, the transformation is serene, accepted, accomplished in the works of the painter.
Paolo Rossetto was born in Bolzano in 1968, but his life has led him to explore many places, relish different cultures and,
above all, to observe and study the works of fascinating artists.
His desire to become an artist was born spying on the movements of those talented. So, he left his accountancy studies, enrolled
in the Art Institute of Trento and was carried away by love for drawing and painting.
After a debut with landscapes and still lifes, Rossetto started to work on the profiles of human beings, especially women,
until he magically combined these genres.
This artist of figurative origins has reached his maturity in recent years, and followed the trail of René Magritte and Paul
Delvaux till he reache the enchanted worlds of surrealism.
In his artistic research, Rossetto starts from the undeniable premise that nature generates life like a woman's body, with
the aim of discovering its secret. "A long and heartfelt dialogue between man and nature," he says.
He presents a seamless kaleidoscope of bodies, but not only female ones, made of flesh and bark, of faces, arms, and legs,
and also logs, branches and leaves. The whole is harmonious and refined.
He’s never satiated with in order knowledge to feed his fantastic projections of moods and existential conditions, and unravels
between ancient and modern techniques: he uses the tempera, oils, acrylics, charcoal, and even pigment powders, following the same
procedure used by the artists of the fourteenth century.
He outlines fusions of dreams and realities: an infant is nursed by a tree with shapes that remind us of a female breast;
Mother Nature has a beautiful and delicate profile of a woman but a spiral trunk springs from her hair aside; a group of
women has legs, arms, hands and hair whose extensions are endless branches.