Patrizio Landolfi (Battipaglia 1954) has never hidden his passion for Renaissance painters, for figurative art, for detail on the canvas. However his works, to a large extent, remain faithful to the abstract: flashes of immediate and preponderant color.

Since his very first works, even if firmly based on realistic nature, he began to see a style aimed to change over time.
Gradually his works have oriented towards abstract expressionism, of which the artist becomes one of the most significant representatives in Italy, known today all over the world.
His painting represents the rapid transfiguration of a vision that extrapolates the inner sphere.

His realism, which over time has become increasingly hidden as well as traceable in paintings where the informal appears to be absolute, is the peculiarity that distinguishes it from other abstract painters.
But there is more, which at first glance can escape.
As Jean Paul Sartre wrote, "Tintoretto is Venice even if he does not paint Venice", with a desire for psychological introspection, Landolfi's abstract art is able to stimulate a reflection on the evolution of contemporary painting, where the description gives way to interpretation of the figures that can be seen in its mixtures of color.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the technique that most distinguishes him, and coined by himself, is called "fragmentation". It gets into detail and break it down. The smallest of the smallest is shredded.
All that’s not only the result of Landolfi's imagination, but refers - through combinations and similarities - to the tradition of pointillism, a pictorial technique characterized by the construction of the image dictated by small touches of pure color and based on scientific research dedicated to optical phenomena.

Landolfi's power lies in the fragment. A task that is not at all simple or predictable, which can take shape only after a long and slow construction of the painting.
"By fragmenting the canvas, creating different levels where layer upon layer color mosaics take shape down to the smallest particle, the resulting effect always surprises me, because it is unexpected," said Landolfi.
The fragments are crossed by channels that make the work almost three-dimensional. But in addition to the immediate visual impact there’s a way to discover hidden varieties that appear from time to time, all of a sudden, as if the canvas itself was speaking, at its own will.
The magnifying glass, which is often found right next to Landolfi's paintings, allows us to scrutinize the details in depth. And the meticulousness is surprising us: an obvious reference to the relationship between macro and microcosm, where even the smallest particle lives its own existence.

The style of the artist over the years undergoes several profitable contaminations that suggest a research for fixed points even in the presence of mixed shapes and heterogeneous colors, which tend to destroy any compositional factor.
New structural and color balances are therefore created, united by unprecedented relationships between rhythm and harmony, through which a recovery of forms and a renewal of values ​​is manifested. From this point of view the series of winged female images with visions full of contradictions representing a fleeting but essential reality that will become a constant theme of his compositions.
Originated from region Campania, after touring Italy far and wide, he settled in Chianti, Tuscany, between Florence and Siena, in Tavarnelle Val di Pesa, where he has his painting studio.
Entering the laboratory of Landolfi is like entering the factory of a Renaissance master. In those hills that separate the Tuscan cities, the workshops of painters and sculptors have prospered since the 1500s.

Many tourists who come to admire the beauties of Tuscany passing from Tavarnelle and stop to visit his studio. His works, instead, are scattered all over the world, from Kuala Lumpur to London, from New Jersey to Canada. The Butterfield family, to which the famous Stewart was the founder of the site Flickr and more recently Slack, an award-winning app for his growth, has also moved into his studio and bought a beautiful David Bowie and other works.
As often happens, the painter Landolfi is not separable from the Landolfi man. It is in his life and in his history that we can find traces of his artistic evolution.
It is no coincidence, again, that the reference to figurative art finds space also in the commitment as the curator of the permanent exhibition "Mahabhatata" which can be visited in the Mosa, museum of spiritual art, in San Casciano Val di Pesa.
As enterprising spirit, Patrizio Landolfi was not afraid to confront the most important squares of contemporary art: he exhibited at the Pall Mall in London, at the Punshkinskaya in St. Petersburg, at the Bhakti Center in Manhattan, and then again in the presence of the members of the Guggenheim of Venice and New York at the Mediolanum Foundation of Padua; at Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Florence; in the Magazzini del Sale, the prestigious headquarters of the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice, made available during the 2017 Biennale as an Outside Biennial Location, where it was part of twenty artists chosen to present the variety and charm of Italian heritage.

Tiziano Fusella