Biography
Alessandro Papetti was born in Milan in 1958, where he currently lives and works.
Catapulting us into a dimension that no longer seems to belong to reality in the strict sense, but rather to the territories, nowadays rarely explored, of the unconscious and memory, of fear and inner darkness, Alessandro Papetti, with his paintings, seems to speak to us at the same time about the beginning of life and death, as well as our never-ending desire to go back, to childhood, to the maternal womb, to prenatal life. Papetti's research, spanning between Baroque anamorphosis and a contemporary attempt to describe a new inner space, generally moves between the dimension of post-existentialist portrait and the painting of large and unsettling industrial landscapes filled with relics abandoned by time.
These investigations, combined with the need to "escape", to approach the "container" with a different psychological attitude, led from 1998 to the creation of the paintings of the Water cycle, exhibited for the first time at the Forni Gallery in Milan in 1999. Bodies suspended in motionless pools or, as in the series The Night Bath, caught in the moment before plunging into the darkness of a sea illuminated only by a livid and lunar light. They are among the first images of figures represented in an outdoor setting. As a result of this new pictorial cycle and the previous one dedicated to industrial environments, the Shipyards were born. Among the first exhibitions dedicated to this new theme, we remember the one at the Galleria dello Scudo in Verona in 2003. Industrial ports, dry docks, and gigantic hulls, ship bodies expressed in their greatness and fragility. Over the years, Papetti periodically revisits his past painting cycles, revisiting them. His interest in the theme of industrial archaeology leads him to continuous research into methods and subjects and to the creation of a series of paintings dedicated to the former Renault factories, exhibited in 2007 at the Musée des années 30 in Paris, in an exhibition entitled Île Seguin.
In the last fifteen years, Papetti has exhibited his works at important international art fairs and collaborated with numerous foreign galleries.
