Born in Brescia in 1963, Paola Pezzi lives and works in Milan. She trained at the Accademia di Brera under Luciano Fabro and Zeno Birolli, and her practice draws on the legacy of Arte Povera.
For the critic Alberto Mattia Martini, a single energy runs through all of her work, “an inspiration that takes shape and form, gesture and space”. Her practice does not follow a linear path: each work seems to arise from the previous one, like an organic transformation. “Paola Pezzi’s art does not proceed by fractures, but by metamorphosis”, he writes. Each piece is a passage, a threshold, within a broader movement that never stops.
Since her debut in the late 1980s, with sculptures she treated like paintings, the artist has explored matter in a personal way. She coaxes humble, contemporary materials, relics of our time: polyurethane, foam rubber, felt, canvases buried in the ground and brought back to light. Martini sees in them echoes of Alberto Burri and Mario Merz. He also sees the poetics of Joseph Beuys, for whom felt and fat were substances of care and energy. For Paola Pezzi too, matter is not a support but a living organism. Every fold and every twist keeps the trace of the hand that shaped it. Above all, it is that hand that brings it to life. Martini quotes Henri Focillon, for whom the hand is “the inventor of forms”. He observes that in the felt spirals and compressed rubber, the artist’s hand “does not transcribe, but imprints energy, captures the flow and makes it visible”.
The shapes that recur in her work are archetypal. For Martini, they are not mere geometric patterns but nuclei of energy in expansion, microcosms that reflect the macrocosm. Because Paola Pezzi works not with noble materials but with objects from the domestic world, the cosmic and the everyday are always intertwined. Martini calls this a “domestic cosmogony”, in which the infinite resides in the most ordinary objects, and everything “even the humblest object, participates in the same universal life principle”.
Her recent works in felt and rubber distil this energy to its essence. Free of formal complacency, these pure forms seem to grow on their own, breathing and multiplying like living cells. In Martini’s words, Paola Pezzi’s work offers itself as a metaphor for life itself: “a form that is never fixed, but continues to be born and renewed”.
Based on the essay “Continuous Flow” by Alberto Mattia Martini
Born in Brescia in 1963, Paola Pezzi lives and works in Milan. She trained at the Accademia di Brera under Luciano Fabro and Zeno Birolli, and her practice draws on the legacy of Arte Povera.
For the critic Alberto Mattia Martini, a single energy runs through all of her work, “an inspiration that takes shape and form, gesture and space”. Her practice does not follow a linear path: each work seems to arise from the previous one, like an organic transformation. “Paola Pezzi’s art does not proceed by fractures, but by metamorphosis”, he writes. Each piece is a passage, a threshold, within a broader movement that never stops.
Since her debut in the late 1980s, with sculptures she treated like paintings, the artist has explored matter in a personal way. She coaxes humble, contemporary materials, relics of our time: polyurethane, foam rubber, felt, canvases buried in the ground and brought back to light. Martini sees in them echoes of Alberto Burri and Mario Merz. He also sees the poetics of Joseph Beuys, for whom felt and fat were substances of care and energy. For Paola Pezzi too, matter is not a support but a living organism. Every fold and every twist keeps the trace of the hand that shaped it. Above all, it is that hand that brings it to life. Martini quotes Henri Focillon, for whom the hand is “the inventor of forms”. He observes that in the felt spirals and compressed rubber, the artist’s hand “does not transcribe, but imprints energy, captures the flow and makes it visible”.
