Paolo Camporese

Paolo Camporese was born in Padova on 14 February 1961. His education was scientifically oriented since its start: he got a degree in Agricultural Sciences and after he obtained his Ph.D. at Bologna, in 1992, he started an academic career as Adjunct Professor at Padova University. Since 2010 he has been teaching Natural Sciences at the Scientific School in Padova.
Paolo Camporese has not chosen Art. Art has chosen him.
The passion for sculpting and modelling chose Paolo while he was walking the furthest possible way from it: the way of Science, of experimental and rational Knowledge of Nature.
Yet, is not Art the Alter Ego of Nature, its dream-like fake, childish imaginary friend and tough step-brother?
From the connection “Earth-Creation-Spiritual Development” his love and passion for clay, the simplest and rawest but most original material, were born and nourished.
So Paolo Camporese’s favourite material has become earthenware: he learned modelling in Padova at the atelier of a local sculptor. There he acquired and started mastering the artistic techniques owing to the work of enlargement of well-known works by Dalì and Léger. Then, he learned how to glaze and finish earthenware with ingobbio technique at a ceramic workshop and lab at Este.
The artist has a primal instinct for modelling which he combines with his love for classic forms. The results are “learned” shapes that express the sculptor’s knowledge of reality but do not simply end there. Paolo Camporese wanders in the Past working his way through the Present to the realm of Spirit, as an experienced but still innocent Pre-romantic Child, still linked to Classical ideals but willing to free himself through the Moderns.
Here arethe little lying, abandoned feminine shapes of patina earthenware resembling Etruscan bronze women, while the glazed slightly coloured abstract forms show the artist’s effort to escape from matter to reach the Soul of Things and its inner symmetry. Here the artist still draws on classical themes and motifs but combines them with the curved torsions and distortions of modernity, with no despise for slightly erotic hints in a quasi-Baroque accent. The golden glaze of the purest Byzantine tradition covers and finishes both abstract and mythological/ allegorical figures in the continual search for the reassuring shelter of the olden times.
Finally, the Human Element and its analysis remains one of Paolo Camporese’s main concerns: Faces and Heads of 17th or 18th century children reflect universal psychological features, still shared in the continuous Flow of Time but revisited and reassembled through modern eyes and sensitivity.