Nunzio Paci (b. 1977) is an Italian visual artist who lives and works in Bologna, Italy. His art-making process is mainly expressed through painting and drawing. Paci has developed a practice which is concerned with philosophical, scientific and environmental issues, with particular emphasis on anatomy and the man-nature relationship. |
Echoing the figurative tradition (in particular that of the Baroque and the Renaissance age) deep-rooted in his cultural background, his imagery is pervaded with ancient influences of human knowledge—anatomy, botany, medicine and taxidermy—merged with references to the spiritual and the dream sphere. The object of his research is the body—human, animal, vegetable—in all its transitions: mutation and hybridization, decline and regeneration.
Anatomy’s fascination is for Nunzio Paci anything but macabre and funereal: it is, in contrast, exertion and vital tension, muscle tissue and fibers, apparatus, hybrids, grafts, evolution. In illness and malformation, he doesn’t spot the evidence of the inevitable decay and the sign of memento mori, but the fight and the strategy that life itself applies to keep on perpetuating through generations.
With this solemn devotion to the natural world and its manifestations, Paci's works present visions of decay and rebirth suffused with an ethereal glow. The dreamlike quality of his paintings suggests how the passage from one state of being to another also involves a shift of viewpoint, and a leap of understanding. His faithful reading of tangible data, through the use of a surreal and poetic language, offers a glimpse into alternative scenarios and impossible perspectives, in the constant effort to reduce, with an intricate weave of illusion and deception, the (unsolvable) distance between artifice and naturalism.
His scope of works with pencil and oil paints creates, by the intertwining of line and colour, detailed amalgamations of plants, humans and animals in what he describes as an intent to “explore the infinite possibilities of life, in search of a balance between reality and imagination”. This delicate balance of analysis with elegance lends his works a sense of the Romantic and the Sublime.
Anatomy’s fascination is for Nunzio Paci anything but macabre and funereal: it is, in contrast, exertion and vital tension, muscle tissue and fibers, apparatus, hybrids, grafts, evolution. In illness and malformation, he doesn’t spot the evidence of the inevitable decay and the sign of memento mori, but the fight and the strategy that life itself applies to keep on perpetuating through generations.
With this solemn devotion to the natural world and its manifestations, Paci's works present visions of decay and rebirth suffused with an ethereal glow. The dreamlike quality of his paintings suggests how the passage from one state of being to another also involves a shift of viewpoint, and a leap of understanding. His faithful reading of tangible data, through the use of a surreal and poetic language, offers a glimpse into alternative scenarios and impossible perspectives, in the constant effort to reduce, with an intricate weave of illusion and deception, the (unsolvable) distance between artifice and naturalism.
His scope of works with pencil and oil paints creates, by the intertwining of line and colour, detailed amalgamations of plants, humans and animals in what he describes as an intent to “explore the infinite possibilities of life, in search of a balance between reality and imagination”. This delicate balance of analysis with elegance lends his works a sense of the Romantic and the Sublime.