27 November 2025 – 24 January 2026
Opening: Thursday, November 27th, 2025 from 18.00
Paolo Pibi
minimi mondi
curated by Ivan Quaroni
Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea is pleased to present Minimi mondi, a solo exhibition by Paolo Pibi curated by Ivan Quaroni. The show brings together about 15 recent works, including acrylics on canvas and board, to narrate the progress of an artist capable of combining visual rigor and visionary imagination, in rare balance of lucid analysis and inner perception.
In this new cycle of works, Pibi investigates the mysterious process through which an image takes form in the mind and becomes painting. Abandoning any traditional procedures – studies, sketches, iconographic references – the artist lets the vision emerge spontaneously in consciousness, and then shifts it onto the painted surface with almost cartographic precision. His practice is an exercise in concentration and listening, a form of radical attention that transforms the canvas into a space of apparition, where reality coagulates like an epiphany.
The paintings often arise from a sky – a uniform, silent background – which is gradually filled by signs and presences: clouds, moons, constellations, geometric patterns, mountains, meadows, light sources. From this heavenly matrix, a suspended universe takes form, populated by figures, objects and natural phenomena that display themselves with almost photographic clarity, as in a daydream. In works like Threshold, Brebus, Moonlit Depths, Sacrae Symphoniae or Liminal, Pibi’s painting is like a slow descent from the immaterial to the concrete, a voyage that takes the artist from pure contemplation to the definition of the form.
His language is also made unique by a personal way of using materials: stretchers bordered by colored elastic bands, frames built from packing straps, oval surfaces inserted in design objects – as in the case of Super (2025), painted on a tennis racket. These grafts generate visual and semantic short circuits, where the image and its container reflect each other, creating new possibilities of meaning.
Pibi’s painting stands out for its mental clarity, for the absence of automatic medianic reflexes. Every painting is the result of a lucid, “clairvoyant” vision that translates inner images into tangible, coherent forms endowed with their own physicality. His minimum worlds are small plausible universes, condensations of light and matter, in perfect balance between the real and the imaginary.
As Ivan Quaroni writes in the essay accompanying the show, “from his lucid, literally clairvoyant activity small plausible universes burst forth, distilled in a terse, concise space of very high imaginative density.”
Paolo Pibi was born in Oristano in 1987. He lives and works in Sardinia, Turin and Milan. After art school, he has developed research that combines formal precision with contemplative tension. His painting, marked by a figurative language of surprising clarity, shifts between imagination and perception, exploring the thresholds between visible reality and mental landscape. He has presented work in many solo and group shows, in Italy and abroad, collaborating with galleries and institutions pertaining to the contemporary scene.
