![]() ![]() Patrizio Di Massimo Self portrait in armour, 2016 oil on canvas, 150 x 120 cm Courtesy the artist and T293 Gallery, Rome Photo Credit: Mark Blower It's as if the stuff wanted to come out that way and I needed to find solutions for this to happen. Many changes occur at this stage as well and details are added which end up giving meaning to the painting. At the end there is a very big gap between the original intention and the final image. At this step I change shapes and proportions, cut and paste elements, add and remove figures. When the underpainting is finished I start adding glazes of colours to render skin, fabric and textures in translucent paint. How do you get this stuff out? I don’t have a method to follow that always works and I am self taught, which makes every painting an experiment. Lately I've been beginning with a found image that appeals to me as a reference and I begin to draw it on the canvas with fluent strokes keeping my sign free and unaltered by thoughts or judgments. Then I paint in monochrome, mixing blue ultramarine and raw umber. Patrizio Di Massimo Sisters in Love, 2016 oil on canvas, 150 x 120 cm Courtesy the artist and T293 Gallery, Rome Photo Credit: Mark Blower I think of contemporary formal possibilities in order to rehabilitate practices of visual story telling and restore the painting ancient function of illustration and rhetorical persuasion. To do this I constantly research techniques and visual tropes so to reference and interrogate the tradition of painting itself, aiming to push it further. Figures standing out in contrast with dismayed and ecstatic eyes. I'm thinking about how to canalize the constitutional element of every human being within a picture and how the relationship between beauty and grotesque, realistic and exaggerated informs this. ![]() What’s on your mind right now? I am working on a new series of oil on canvases with mars black backgrounds. I live in London, which I came to in 2007 and I am a painter. I was born 33 years ago in Jesi, a town in the middle Adriatic Italian cost. Patrizio Di Massimo Red Yellow and Blue, 2016 oil on canvas, 150 x 150 cm Courtesy the artist and T293 Gallery, Rome Photo Credit: Mark Blower A subsequent trip to Libya, Schifano’s home during Italy’s ill-fated experiment at imperialism, resulted in a series of drawings inspired by colonial iconography but it wasn’t until 2009 on the occasion of his degree show at the Slade School of Art in London – when Di Massimo showed a series of male figures loosely adopting fascistic mannerisms next to one of women and aptly named after Picasso’s aphorism (‘As every artist I am first of all a painter of women’) – that painting began to claim a central role in his practice. Di Massimo’s combined interest in personal and collective history, along with a soft spot for the twisted side of things, is the driving force behind his body of work. Here, the Vitamin P3-featured painter tells us what interests, inspires and spurs him on. This early demonstration was followed a few months later by a more imposing, albeit completely different presentation, this time on an actual plinth, of an apocryphal painting by Mario Schifano purchased at a flea market in Rome. One of the first, timid appearances of painting in his work took place in a group show at FormContent in London in 2008, where he exhibited a small charcoal on canvas depicting a profile of a head on a plinth – a work that in the darkness of the room could have been easily confused with the brick wall on which it was hanging, were it not for the slim wooden frame around it. Although he fell in love with the work of Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico and Salvador Dali when he bought his first modern art book as a teenager, Di Massimo’s early efforts were mostly executed in video, photography and performance. Painting is not the only medium Patrizio Di Massimo is well acquainted with. Patrizio di Massimo - photographed by Mark Blower Patrizio di Massimo - Why I PaintĮxploring the creative processes of tomorrow's artists today - as featured in Vitamin P3 ![]()
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