1988 – Mario De Micheli

“…And he is thus, the last Pardini, the one that we can admire in this exhibition: brilliant in his use of color, laid back in his composition, lyrical in his amity with inspiration.

I would say that this last aspect is the one that stands out exponentially and gives a particular personality to his painting. His images are, in fact, animated by an impulse which allows them to roll onto the canvas as though struck by a fresh breeze.

Pardini’s painting style is not one of anxiety or apprehension. It is instead a style of enchantment and happiness, with a positive outlook towards existence running through it.”

MARIO DE MICHELI

(Genova, April 1914 – Milan, August 2004) was an Italian writer and art critic.

A historian of the artistic avant-garde of the 1900s, Mario De Micheli supported with a passion art which was socially and civically aware, with his criticism of Italian and European artists from the early 1940s to the end of the century. Born in Genova, he graduated from university in Milan in 1938, writing a dissertation on the Surrealist poets, In Milan he was part of the Corrente group, an anti-fascist faction. He founded various art magazines, from Realismo to Artecontro, and organized numerous national and international exhibitions. For years he was the official art critic for the daily newspaper “L’Unità”. The fact that many important Hungarian and Rumanian poets, as well as many European artists that Italian culture had yet to encounter such as the German sculptor Kaethe Kollwtz, became well-known in Italy is down to him. His critical vision can be summed up in the search for an art that is attentive to the values of man and his struggle against history’s brutalities. There are many important Italian artists whose careers he boosted in a significant manner. He died in Milan and is buried in Trezzo d’Adda, the library of which he named as heir to his precious book collection. His strong anti-fascist partisan vision, supporting the liberation of the more fragile social classes, meant that many read his reviews as an imprint of his ideology, although history will bear witness to the fact that his reviews, never one-sided, were always attentive to the pluralism of languages and diverse cultural backgrounds. “A tendency to multiply tendencies”: this phrase was the order of the day for him, and a clear sign of his everlasting topicality.

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