Mimmo Paladino is an artist who because of his influence on creative paradigms is considered one of the classics of contemporary art, while because of the themes and motifs that through his body of work he has brought back onto the horizon of visual arts, he is also considered a facilitator of classical ideas about the exaltedness of art object and crafts. Mimmo Paladino, along with the work of other Italian artists such as Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi and Nicola de Maria, is considered to be the central figure of Transavantgarde. The movement named and promoted by the theoretician Achille Bonito Oliva, founded its creative strategy on figuration, symbolism and reliance on the rich heritage of global culture, as well as on the affirmation of creative hedonism of traditional artistic disciplines. The emergence of Transavantgarde in the seventies of the past century and its rapid international success during the dominance of conceptual art, announced the end of both modernistic concept of the linear evolution of styles and avantgarde programmes with their radical break from the past. The Transavantgarde represented the first major return to figurative painting and sculpture that in the following decades would be repeated cyclically, while today we are witnessing its strong re-emergence. In our region, the influence of Transavantgarde has manifested itself in significant artistic tendencies of the eighties united through the New picture syntagm. The great success of the movement in our parts manifested its intuitive and profound understanding, which stems from the cultural closeness and affinity to the Mediterranean circle we share, despite recent historical distancing of the two Adriatic coasts.
Branko Franceschi