Paolo Maggis, YOU ARE MY FACE

Room 19

«I have always painted portraits. Since I was young, since I was about sixteen. I’m obsessed with “faces”. I’m obsessed with emerging parts and recesses, colours and shadows… And movements. A small tic, a deformation, a rapid, jerky movement of the eyes; just the act of someone reading was reason for me to observe these animal movements. The movement of a face is like a shark documentary, the same jerky movements, simply more contained. And then the movements of the nostrils, especially when one had a cold, better than any museum. A cold person’s vermillion-red nose has always been a source of excitement and remains one of my favourite colours to this day… The only thing I have never liked to watch is a person cry… It makes me nervous, it makes everything less interesting, more false. I like faces that hide a secret… I like things you can’t capture.»
Paolo Maggis

«Nobody takes painting any more for what it has been for centuries: representation of particular themes that become more or less universal thanks to the greater or lesser effectiveness of the language adopted.
Maggis is one of the few who understands and uses it in this way, and even before looking at his canvases you can tell by the Olympic serenity he shows when illustrating them to some visitors: the subject is this, I painted it because I liked the image I found elsewhere or because it moved me in itself, I painted it this way because it seemed closer to the character of what I was painting… And so on.»
Marco Meneguzzo

THE ARTIST

Paolo Maggis was born in Milan in 1978. He graduated from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts and lived in Berlin from 2005 to 2008. He currently lives and works between Barcelona and Milan. After completing his studies, he developed a very personal pictorial language. Generally, his compositions are based on snapshots of peers, relatives or children in their everyday lives, which he reworks through a strongly expressionist style of painting. He has exhibited in numerous galleries in Italy and abroad, in particular: in 2004 at the Galerie Binz & Krämer and at the Beaker Gallery in Tampa, Florida. In 2005 he held the exhibition Dieci di te at the Museo della Permanente in Milan and for two consecutive years, 2006 and 2007, he exhibited at the Galeria Metropolitana in Barcelona. In 2008 he participated in the Olympic Fine Arts in Beijing and exhibited Tohuwabohu at the Gesellshaft der Freunde Junger Kunst in Baden, Germany.