25.11.2025 PAUL RUSSOTTO Opere/Works 1956-2012 a cura di Giuseppe Appella

Introduction Gianni Dessì Speakers Alessia Montefalco, curator Arnaldo Colasanti, writer and literary critic Carlo Alberto Bucci, art critic Marta Ragozzino, art historian Giuseppe Appella, curator and critic Luca Russotto, the artist's son, will be present. His birth in New York on May 28, 1944, to parents of Sicilian and Lucanian origins; his move to Huntington, located in the central part of Long Island; his enrollment first at Walt Whitman High School and then at the Art Students League of New York, where his teachers were Frank Mason for painting and Raymond Breinin for drawing; his long stays in museums; his time in Hoboken, New Jersey; his move to St. James, his stay in Albany, his return to New York in 1976; his intense and continuous study of Cézanne (the structure of planes in relation to color) and Picasso (the (The overlapping of images that, retracing the centuries, arrive directly at the cave of Paul's first lines-experiences), the friendship with the solitary and silent George Spaventa, are the coordinates of a painting that has never renounced the figure, just like Dubuffet, Bacon, and De Kooning. And he has fought not to fall into style, into that system that crushes talent and inspiration by covering them with the cloak of academia. Even when he draws or paints, with absolute dedication and a progressively matured expertise, the objects, people, machines, and architecture that surround him. A sort of autobiography and homage to those who helped him grow, to read within himself through art, especially drawing, which on every occasion saved him from loneliness. It's no coincidence that in a 1966 notebook, in a small 6.5 x 6.5 cm inkwell, he approached Franz Kline, who had died four years earlier, and definitively realized that he could create something truly meaningful even without reference to the recognizability of the reality around him, and that each of his works was the result of intense and spontaneous yet conscious study. Charcoal, pencil, pastel, ink, and the collage that complements them would be fundamental for all the lines and visual formulations useful for following the progress of thought in interpreting the surrounding reality and communicating this experience. Almost as if to confirm Kline's lesson: "Painting is a form of drawing, and the painting I like has a form of drawing within itself. I don't see how it could be separated from the nature of drawing." For a long time, over the years, even after moving to Todi, where the exchange with Ellen, a scholar of American abstract expressionism, and with Alan Jones, often passing through the Todi countryside, became more intense, with the American art historian Barbara Novak and her husband Brian O'Doherty, busy painting his entire house in the historic center, following the commitment of Henri Matisse in Saint-Paul-de-Vence and Mark Rothko in Houston, with the photographer George Tatge, with Gabriella Drudi and Toti Scialoja in the latter's studio in Piazza Mattei in Rome, where all the painters of the New York School had stopped, there was a long discussion of the images painted by Russotto, of this ghost made presence and vice versa, of this vilified icon, swept away by the vortex of the brushstroke or the tear and yet consigned to privacy, to the severity of discipline and rigor. Russotto identified art with life, with the certainty that gave him a unique way of existing, of entrusting the genesis of art to gesture, where gesture and tear also represent the joy of living, madness, religiosity, consciousness, instinct, grace. As if to say: the brightness of Long Island in his early childhood, tied to his parents' ancestral memories (the old world), transmigrated into the romantic myth of America (the new world); the subtle source of poetry channeled into the heart of ethnic differences; interiority transferred to the structure of the skyscraper; the sweetness of the Umbrian countryside in the rugged opening of the gullies and the timeless vastness of the Murgia Materana, to simply take on its colors. A free form, therefore, an event always at the center of one's being, not an acronym or a definition, referring to the changing reality of the day and the seasons, to the eternal struggle between life and death, to the variable expression of man that the lump of matter absorbs and explodes on the luminous surface with vibrations of particles, swarming organisms of human situations, primordial, swirling, full dreams, which is emotion made poetry. Paul died in New Port Richey, Florida, on February 23, 2014. The monograph is edited by Giuseppe Appella, who has always followed the artist's work and selected the works that now represent him in the Russotto Museum in Aliano (MT). Paul Russotto. Opere-Works 1956-2012, edited by Giuseppe Appella, Silvana Editoriale, Cinisello Balsamo 2025