Artists

Patrizio di Massimo

Press release

Opening: Thursday, 30 January, 2025; 6-9 pm

For Patrizio di Massimo, painting – both an urge and an obsession – serves as the ultimate analytical tool for exploring the emotional and psychological states of human life. As a self-taught painter and deep connoisseur of the great masters, di Massimo blends classical iconography with contemporary visual culture, re-examining both past and present through his own emotional and personal lens. The subjects of his paintings often resemble people who are dear to him and belong to the art world – such as artists, collectors or curators –; these allow him to identify himself from time to time in different roles and characters, investigating art history and contemporary issues relating to identity, self-determination and masculinity.

The exhibition Friends, Foes, Beds and Beaus, di Massimo’s first solo show at the Gió Marconi gallery, takes place at a specific moment in the artist’s career and is the result of a year-long working process. During this extended creative journey, on several occasions he put his hand to the artworks in his London studio, a space capable of influencing the practice itself and in which he allowed himself to listen to his own thoughts in a state of deep solitude studded with introspective insights. In its evolution and transformation, his painting practice – metaphorical, symbolist and openly lyrical – has maintained an underlying coherence over the years that is expressed here once again through a profound emotional, expressive and conceptual awareness that emerges from the exploration of the portrait and self-portrait. The artist’s urge appears to be guided by the same instances that have characterised his path since his beginnings at the Brera Academy in Milan: the ineluctable necessity to question himself and his own identity, the world around him and the relationships we weave. By structuring a quest that is as much artistic as spiritual, di Massimo offers us access to his own life mediated by a visionary essence. In a process that makes him ever more (re)knowable to the observer letting him develop a progressive focus on his own image, the artist sheds – and then reclaims at will – the conventions that define male identity within the framework of painting.

Di Massimo meticulously arranges photo shoots, orchestrating every detail with his friends to achieve the desired image. Several tests are often required before the artist obtains the desired result, in a deeply performative action that can last even hours. Patrizio di Massimo’s practice thus is fully endowed with a deeply performative capacity, implicit both in the creative method of the works, through the articulated steps that characterise them, and beforehand, in the feelings and urges that define and guide his work in the discovery of possible lives, situations and embodiments. Before painting, the artist digitally edits the photo by changing elements, sometimes mixing several different pictures and often altering the size of the faces, a ploy also used in ancient portraiture. Over the years di Massimo developed an increasingly consolidated oil technique, preparing the canvases by means of a process conceived with non-absorbent chalk and different colours, warmer or cooler according to the overpainting applied.