I VOLI

Antonio Paradiso

04/12/2018 – 26/01/2019

From 4 December to 26 January 2019, the BABS Art Gallery, the new Milanese artistic showcase dedicated to the artist’s jewel, hosts the solo exhibition of Antonio Paradiso curated by Ermanno Tedeschi. The artist will be asked to interpret his masterpieces in stone and corten as small sculptures to wear, all unique pieces or limited and certified editions, created exclusively for BABS Art gallery. The jewels of Antonio Paradiso will dialogue within the exhibition with his sculptural works, in a game of respective references that makes his artistic research even more evident.

The art of Antonio Paradiso is so delicate and mysterious that sometimes it becomes (deliberately) impenetrable, it draws inspiration from an anthropological research on the ancestral roots of man. Conditioned by a childhood spent in the family farm in Puglia, his early years of artistic activity are configured as a practice of recovery of a forgotten peasant world and expressed by the artist through the creation of monumental sculptures “throne” stone of Trani and powerful concatenated spheres. In the late 1980s, he began working on the subject of bird flight. What most fascinates the artist, is the secret of their orientation over long distances during migrations; a mystery that he explains only by seeing in the need of these animals to return to their companion or companion a manifestation of divine love in Nature. In the act of flight, Paradise reads a gravitational challenge of being, an expression of total freedom. His first “Flights” are imposing blocks of stone, which the artist places in the heart of the Milanese metropolis, or shaped totems in corten, inserted within his Sculpture Park “La Palomba”, inaugurated in 2000 in Matera. The step from large to small size is very short, and Paradiso begins to elaborate the theme dear to him of flight also in the creation of jewelry, experimenting with different materials such as bronze, silver, gold and hard stones. And this is how his “Flights” in stone and corten are transformed into small sculptures to wear: earrings, necklaces, cufflinks and bracelets, which preserve all the poetry of the gesture of freedom made by the wings of a dove, albeit “limited” in the space of a wrist or hand.