Giacomo Veneziano

Paolo Fresu was born in Asti on November 13, 1950, where he still lives and has his studio. After graduating from the Art School of Turin, he attended the Albertina Academy and then interrupted his studies to dedicate himself solely to theater, film and television scenography: Come e perché crollò il Colosseo by Luigi De Filippo – Naples 1981; Grunt by Giorgio Faletti and Andy Luotto – Rome 1982; Fantastico 90, RAI 1 – Rome 1990. With the Gruppo Teatro Asti he designed sets and costumes for Il malato immaginario and Il Mercante di Venezia. He also works as an illustrator in the publishing and advertising fields. In 1992 he created the poster and the prize sculpture for the Astiteatro 14 theater festival. Three years later he created a large panel permanently exhibited in the atrium of the train station in his hometown, on the occasion of the nine hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the Municipality. In 1997 he painted the two banners of the Palio of Asti, one of which is now preserved in the Collegiate Church of San Secondo. From the 70s to the present day the artist has collected a large number of solo and group exhibitions throughout Italy, including the recent anthologies at the Foyer of the Teatro Alfieri in Asti in 1992 and in the Antico Battistero di San Pietro in 1997.

Two other solo exhibitions took place in Alessandria, at the former Convent of San Francesco in 2000 and at the Teatro di Moncalvo in 2001. This was followed in March 2003 by an exhibition curated by Maride Faussone in Acqui Terme (Palazzo Robellini) entitled Lo specchio di Tersicore, inspired by dance. In the same year, a solo exhibition took place in Albissola Marina at the Galleria Il Bostrico, a summary of Fresu's fairy-tale, ironic and surreal world. His early artistic production was characterised by a lively sensitivity to European expressionist tendencies , which led him to experiment with the use of different materials, colours and pictorial substances. In the 1970s and 1980s he used ink and pastel and then turned to collage and polymaterial assemblages of surreal influence. His favourite subjects were kings, queens, puppets, Pinocchios, generals, prelates and original interpretations of famous historical figures; a rich and ironic repertoire of characters that embody the allegory of human life. As protagonists of a world halfway between the real and the imaginary, Fresu's creations each play their own role in the social scale, assuming a profound symbolism of an existential nature, albeit hidden by a sometimes mocking mask of joy and lightheartedness.