Paolo Moretto
PROFILE
Paolo Moretto stems from Verona and has been living in Hamburg for almost
20 years. In his opinion the connecting element between both cities is water,
more precisely: they are characterized by having a river with a port and
related industries and infrastructure. They are differentiated by the attitude
to life of the spirited, often spontaneous and sensual reacting catholic
Italians on one hand and the honest, sometimes reserved and cool behaving
“Hanseatics” with their emphasis on business. Moretto has benefitted from
that tension as well as from the cities as independent areas – many of his
works pick out water as a central theme and balanced tensions between
assumed infringements provide them with an ease, which reminds
sometimes ironically and sometimes melancholically of naivety, without
being limited to it.
Therefore, Moretto’s works cannot be broken down to such an easy to be
caught theme as “water”, because the meaning of water end what it can
stand for, is far from being fix and different in each work. As such a trace of
openness, specific patterns, forms, terms and contours can be found
throughout Moretto’s oeuvre whereby the individual motifs may appear
repeatedly over a longer period of time in various contexts. Behind this is
seriality and recognition, alienation and montage, but rather as a reference
to concepts than their realization. Moretto is well-read, he knows the turns
of the current theory and understands the provocative potential of
philosophy. But he neither wants to copy its ideas nor to show them in
performance. He feels rather encouraged by it to transform objects of
everyday life into symbols by putting those into the perspective of art history
using his own means of expression. Their meaning is never fixed, since they
are not limited to a unique reference. Instead they can be interpreted as
strikingly as they can be thought of auto-reflexively. Therefore, the works of
a pattern-series are not collocated. Therefore, cited forms do work like “Ex
Voti” without their explicit differentiation from their originally religious
contexts. Moretto’s game with significance has reached an openness, which
does not make it seem to be of vital importance, but which grounds in forms
and materials of the living environment.