Giuliano Paladini © NN
I received a gift from my friend Giuliano Paladini of a weighty volume in which he collected his story as a painter. Printed by Studio Noferini of Borgo San Lorenzo, the volume has this title. “Giuliano Paladini. A 50 year long history. A collection of the years that marked my life as a painter”. Paladini is too well known, and also well reviewed in recent years, to say anything new about him and his painting. I will briefly focus on what is special about this beautiful collection of images of his paintings and the rereading of certain articles concerning his art which appeared in the local press and elsewhere (articles by Aldo Giovannini, Fabrizio Scheggi, Paolo Marini, Lanfranco Villani, and others, including myself).
Giuliano Paladini is, among the large group of good Mugello painters, the one who more than others has brought to canvas the Mugello countryside which no longer exists, with its old farmers, the poor means of work, the harvesting seasons, the harvest, chestnuts, sowing, the grapes, the inevitable turkeys, the stables, the majestic cows.
An “archaeological painter”, therefore, on the thread of memory and his memories, he who comes from a peasant family. Therefore not only a good and sensitive landscape painter (and not only from Mugello, but from every place he has visited, always accompanied by his palette). This volume amply demonstrates this, from the beginning to today.
But there is another aspect of Paladini’s long artistic activity to highlight.
Giuliano was never just a painter. For him, painting has always been a means of going out, literally and symbolically, meeting other people, other arts, creating connections, networking. He is not the painter closed in his studio, closed in his art. He is a great organizer and promoter of ideas, of socializing artistic opportunities. A culture councilor… without being one.
The most striking example – which finds space in the volume in question – is the inexhaustible activism within the “Associazione Dalle Terre di Giotto e dell’Angelico” which for years has made Giotto’s House in Vespignano a very active and aggregating, open to all the arts, not just painting. And he made it a true garden of the House, perhaps the most beautiful garden in Mugello, usable, visitable, public. This generosity of Paladini, which manifests itself in various ways and which goes beyond him being a good painter, I believe is a trait of his fifty years of activity that should be highlighted.
Paladini’s volume talks about 50 years spent painting, organizing, promoting, socializing. We wish Giuliano, his friend, the painter, another 50 years like this.
(The volume is not on the market, anyone wanting a copy can contact the author directly)
Bruno Confortini
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