Paolo Masi - Dual Space

The MA*GA Museum will display installations and environmental artworks crafted by the artist using different materials over time since the 1960s with the aim of shifting space perception, such as the great installation presented at the Venice Biennale in 1978.
The five VIP Lounge rooms located at Milan Malpensa Terminal 1, will host a selection of both historical and more recent core pictorial works illustrating Masi’s research on abstract-geometric painting.
The project, curated by Lorenzo Bruni, offers an in-depth overview of the artist’s research conducted since the end of the 1950s, through pictorial cycles which, although undertaken in different decades, all share the topic of the colour-sign “vibration”, which “reveals” itself as it comes into relationship with the chosen support material. The exhibition pathway is completed by installations made with different media, ranging from wooden-frame floor installations to Plexiglas sheets painted with geometrical shapes suspended mid-air.
The artworks presented in this exhibition, illustrate key passages in the career of this Florentine artist who has tackled, decade after decade, the limits and potential of the object-canvas, of abstract painting and of art as a political act.
While exercising this painting practice, his investigation led him, at the end of the 1950s, to undertaking intense activity as a catalyst for cultural renewal, organising exhibits inside Union Halls, at private galleries and in public spaces, and later founding art collectives and art venues in his town, including L'Aquilone, F-Uno, Zona in the 1970s and, in 1998 Base / Progetti per l'arte, which celebrates its 20 years of activity this year.
As Lorenzo Bruni says: “The path of the exhibition Dual Space, comparable to one single organic work, has been envisaged as a privileged observatory from which, through Masi’s artwork, one can appreciate the different tensions which have animated the Italian artistic debate and have a acquired the name of “Pittura Analitica” (Analytical Painting),  “Concrete Art”, “Kinetic Art” and “Arte Programmata” and, at the same time, one can observe the kind of processes the artist conceived with careful attention to searching for an alternative to his research in order not to demote his artwork solely to an ideological or aesthetic matter, a question of rationalization or instinct.”
The title Dual Space is meant to highlight Paolo Masi’s approach, where the space of art and life, individual gestures and collective needs, freedom from rules and rules of freedom, all coexist.
Three main, constant aspects emerge in this perspective: The investigation into colour vibration in dialogue with both the history of painting and its adherence to the contemporary, freedom in combining lines, surfaces and colour-material interaction, and finally, its dialectics with public spaces.
Paolo Masi’s double tension in trying to make opposites coexist is highlighted further in the two sections organized specifically for the MA*GA: the installation Riflessioni Riflesse/Reflective Reflections in the Museum square consists of fluorescent monochrome reflecting Plexiglas discs capable of expanding space perception and a selection of works from museum collections, curated by Masi himself, evoking the 1960s and 1970s art mood that he was such a part of, with artworks by Lucio Fontana, Gianni Colombo, Getulio Alvian, Giorgio Griffa and others.

Paolo Masi was born in Florence in 1933, where he still lives and work. His activity is strictly related to a constant experimentation on ways to work and transform materials; for Masi, artistic action is always something in becoming, which opens itself each time to new insights and new solutions.
His first solo exhibit at the Strozzina in Florence in 1960, was followed by several exhibitions in some of the leading Italian and European galleries: Numero (Florence), Cenobio (Milan), L’Aquilone (Florence), Schema (Florence), Christian Stein (Turin), Lydia Megert (Berne), d+c Mueller Roth (Stuttgart), Thomas Keller (Munich), Primo Piano (Rome), La Polena (Genoa), Ariete (Milan), La Piramide (Florence), Centro d’Arte Spaziotempo (Florence), Galleria Studio G7 (Bologna), and Fondazione Mudima (Milan). 
After measuring himself with post-informal experimentation and researching abstraction and Neo-Concretism, he approached contextual Analytical-Reductive experiences, disassembling and reorganising, on the floor or wall, aluminium bars, mirrors, threads or minute coloured Plexiglas sticks which spread their “space-colour” rhythm out to the 3rd dimension. 
The project Rilevamenti esterni-conferme interne/Outdoor surveys – indoor proofs (1974-76), developed both outdoors with polaroid pictures of drains, walls and floors started in 1974 in New York and indoors at his studio with Tessiture (sewn rough canvas) and Cartoni da Imballaggio (cardboard boxes), where, for the first time, he made use of see-through and solid colour stickers thus showing the media inner structure, that marked his return to a 2D approach.
Since 1974, Masi has been co-founder, alongside Maurizio Nannucci and Mario Mariotti, of a collective that manages a local non-profit venue in Florence, an experience carried through to the Collective Base from 1998 onwards. 
Furthermore, of note are his participations in “I colori della pittura. Una situazione europea” (curated by Italo Mussa, Rome 1976), the 38th Venice Biennale (1978); the 11th  Quadriennale in Rome (1986); the exhibitions “Kunstlerbücher” in Frankfurt and “Erweitert Photographie Wiener Secession” in Vienna (1980); the Parisian exhibition “Livres d'artistes” (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1985), “Arte in Toscana 1945-2000” (Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Palazzo Fabroni, Pistoia 2002), and “Pittura Analitica. I percorsi italiani 1970-1980” (Museo della Permanente, Milan 2007), the exhibition “Alla Maniera d'Oggi. Base a Firenze” (Cloisters of San Marco, Florence 2010); the solo shows in Bludenz, at the Lissone Contemporary Art Museum, at the Mudima Foundation in Milan; at “La Torre di Babele” (Former Lucchesi factory, Prato 2016), at “Versus. La sfida dell'artista al suo modello in un secolo di fotografia e disegno” (Galleria Civica, Modena 2016), and “Pittura Analitica. Ieri e oggi” (Mazzoleni Art, London – Turin 2017). 
In 2013, during the exhibition shown at the Frittelli Arte Contemporanea gallery in Florence, the artist’s first comprehensive monograph Paolo Masi. La responsabilità dell’occhio was released, curated by Flaminio Gualdoni, published by Gli Ori.
In 2014, Masi presented the installation Riflessioni Riflesse/Reflective Reflections at the Cloisters of the Basilica of Sant’Ambrogio in Milan, at Corriere della Sera-Sala Albertini, in the Palazzo dell’Archiginnasio courtyard in Bologna (2015), in Piazza San Fedele in Milan (2016) and the installation Camminate come figli della luce – Walk as Children of Light in the Church of Sant’Eufemia in Verona (2016).
Some historical pieces by the artist can be seen in the collections of the Mart in Rovereto, the Pecci Museum in Prato, the Gallery of Modern Art at Palazzo Pitti in Florence, the Modern Art Gallery in Turin and at the Museo Novecento in Florence.