Paolo Colombo | 8 November 2023 - 30 March 2024

OLIVIER VARENNE is proud to present a group of recent works by Paolo Colombo in his Geneva gallery. On show will be a new series of watercolours as well as videos from Colombo’s Stone Theatre series.

On show will be large word-based pieces, ‘visual poetry’, their painterly vocabulary consisting of Colombo’s distinctive finely painted weave, which started out as collage, effectively appliquéd with his own poetry. From literature studies in Rome, and the important influence and friendship with sculptor, theorist and poet Fausto Melotti (1901-1986), to poetry by Modern Greek poets Cavafis and Seferis, the written word, as well as music, have been consistent and increasingly important sources of inspiration in his work. The interplay of his personally evolved and meticulous technique with the ethereal world Colombo evokes through his poetry, is thoroughly represented in the exhibited works, with the additional result that the viewer is invited on their own meditative, visual journey.

Throughout Colombo’s practice, economy of means is of paramount importance. Byzantine and folk embroidery are a deep source of inspiration, notably for their simplicity, and with his Stone Theatre, his goal is ‘to do something, with almost nothing’, since, as he notes, ‘simple things construct a world’.

PAOLO COLOMBO (b. 1949)

Italian artist and curator, Paolo Colombo, was born in Turin and currently lives and works in Athens. Drawing and painting has held a fascination for him from a young age. After a career as a curator, which included curating the Iraqi Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2017); working as curator of the Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo in Rome (2001-2007), and as the director of the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva (1989 – 2000), in 2007 Colombo returned to life as an artist exclusively using pencil and watercolour, the same two forms of media he used from the age of 18.