Biography
Paolo Fraternali, painter and engraver, was born in Urbino on September 1964. He graduated at the chalcographic engraving section of the Public Institute of Art in Urbino (previously “Scuola del Libro”) and then at the Academy of Urbino in 1987. He was artistically educated observing and working for engravers and stamp artists throughout Italy. He taught technical engraving at the Academies of Arts in Urbino, Macerata, Palermo, Sassari, Catanzaro, Lecce and he is currently a tutor at the Academy of Arts in Venice. In 2001 he won the 4th “Fabio Bertoni” award and currently lives in Fermignano (Pesaro Urbino, Italy).
Paolo Fraternali for Art Power
In the work of Paolo Fraternali, the swing between painting and engraving (the subject that he teaches at the Urbino’s Art Institute) is the natural result of an artist who has developed the ability to use the best technique according to what he wishes to communicate.
The loss of value of artwork, in its most artistic sense (of its “halo” in the words of W. Benjamin) which Fraternali himself defines as “art de boutique” – manufactured art – also creates the loss of the superior message of which art has always been, if not the bearer, the way through. Moreover today, many of those who consider themselves as artists, or whom are crowned by the market as such, are not always able to be truly innovative and it often happens that they tend to fall into the “already seen” or, in the perpetual search for what the market asks for, no longer poetry or “vanguard.”
This is certainly not the case of the artist presented here whom, on the contrary, upholds the necessity for stopping, resting on the edge of the world and observing whom and what goes by. He insists on the need to approach the world with the purity of mind of a child (a sort of revisited “child poetry” from Pascoli) in order to see and evaluate in a more objective and pure way everything that happens inside and outside of ourselves. To improve and to be improved.
“Regression” is the word that Fraternali uses to describe the need for everyone to develop the capacity/necessity to stop and think. It is a shape-word, which implies many meanings, but in Art the dichotomy progression/regression cannot exist with the same meaning of linear development given to sciences (where a new discovery creates advancement or supercedes the previously obtained data).
In this environment, not enslaved to technical dogmas or to the linear conception of history, each and every artwork becomes a testimonial of its time, of its culture and it is not absolutely guaranteed that, following a temporal progression, an advancement in art will have been created. How many great and original examples of artwork from ancient times spring to mind whereas what a hard time we have finding such excellent works today!
Art is then intended as an instrument to let the being rise up, to let the hidden nature of things rise up, which the artist communicates through his sensibility to everybody who has developed the ability to stop and listen.
The colors of Marche’s land, the texture of its tilled fields, the visible marking lines of the land, they are all elements which can be found in the works of Fraternali accompanied by a rhythm with a very strong sense of musicality.
