PAOLO CONTI

The art of Paolo Conti, from his beginnings in the late Sixties, investigated the concept of identity. Starting from the use of industrial-grade scrap metal, already defined in 1971 by Barilli as “industry negatives”, Conti has constantly deepened his research with an extraordinary metaphorical approach, analyzing the contemporary world. Those debris, recovered in landfills, have multiple forms, yet they all look equally rotting, because they are not useful in the society of profit. As Conti has often underlined, “they exist even though they are not: they are, by definition, a banned identity“.  Paolo Conti seeks the dimension of a “new space”: he creates it and conceives it as a real object, a product of man but, a-historical and abstract. Each created object has an industrial nature, scraps of steel or iron, which undergo repeatable passages, processes that establish the scientific nature of the operation. This is how the “useful piece” is born.