Reviews

Professor Vittorio Sgarbi - Italian art critic, essayist, politician, television personality and columnist.

"The cinematic imagery enters by right among the inspirations that move the poetics of the artist Katiuscia Papaleo on the canvas.

Through a use of intense and emotional colors, the painter Papaleo works with convincing chromatic explosions, in a bright and extensive palette in all possible shades.

We can affirm that the entire aesthetic vision of the artist, is based precisely on these important chromatic choices that take the scene and that heavily affect the overall emotion that her subjects transmit to the viewer.

The dramatic tones are lit by the colors that are hot and cold together, they create the atmosphere that brings us back in direct connection to the titles of the pieces , thus framing the primiigenial intent of the artist Papaleo.

The centrality of her inspiration runs along the thread of love for art itself; for making art, in an exaltation of the position of the artist who creates in today; her poetics embraces femininity in its acceptation of the symbol, even when it can be conceptualized in a Japanese sword that combines the delicacy of the flower with the deadly relentlessness of forged metal.

The essence of the feminine imagination is her gentle and patient strength, imbued with mystery and references that represent the woman joined to nature that explodes in its extreme magnificence through the flower when it blooms and when is lightly carried by the breeze that marks the changing of the seasons.

In her works more exquisitely focused on the feminine, Katiuscia Papaleo, takes us in front of initiatory rites, of those finished seasons and of closed chapters that open to new cycles of life, therefore to something that is worth celebrating because they are the beginning of a greater awareness that is the growth and acceptance of continuing the journey in blissful solitude, without ever stopping."

Professor Alberto D'Atanasio - Director of Casa Modigliani and Art Historian.

"There was a surrealism that gave an image to the paradox, to the imaginary and what was the result of the dream study. Then there is a surrealism by Katiuscia Papaleo that is true introspection of the figures and landscapes of the spirit. This artist with a formidable talent gives figure and dynamism to the ineffable wind that runs through the caverns of the human interior.

In her paintings, the nights are contemplated ,illuminated by auroras generated by the light of a girl who wanted to stop time, who resisted aphonia and agony of these times.

Her paintings shake and enchant, I make my thoughts messy with that wind and Katiuscia depicts the colors of that wind. "

Luca Cantore D’Amore - Art Critic

"It is a calm and linear chaos, the one that unfolds in front our eyes once in contact with the work of Katiuscia Papaleo. Different levels of composition and opposite shades, sometimes even strong and contrasting ones, calmly contribute to the achievement of a general harmony that leads us to relaxation. In her dizzying and reckless combinations, there is something deeply relaxing for the eyes and moods, as they are forced to change, irremediably, even within the same canvas. The way in which they change, in fact, is closely linked to the use of deliberately contradictory, but not for this reason incomprehensible, the color of the works. In fact, to fully understand them, it is enough simply to observe them through the channel of feelings, moods, emotions: abandoning, for a moment, the too often cloying technicalities of art."

Arpinè Sevagian - Critic and Historian of Art

"Eclectic artist, Katiuscia Papaleo expresses herself through art, preferring painting as “a medium” to fully represent the complex artistic world in continuous and constant evolution. With her refined, polished , subtle and sophisticated poetics and with her incisive desire for visual deception, through the mixture of styles and perspective languages, she presents us with a nature that is illusion, appearance, mirage and which is a chimera that immerses us in a world made of colours and shapes with a harmonious, lyrical and intense chromatic balance. In painting Katiuscia Papaleo finds the expressive means more congenial to her, which best concretizes her ideas, emotions, visual sensations, elaborated and then reported on the pictorial support with extreme elegance and delicacy. Creator of illusions, she converts the nature into the poetry. Sensitive and delicate artist, through her research she investigates the deepest aspects of tangible reality.

Figures belonging to the collective, popular imagination acquire a different meaning thanks to the artist's intervention.An art that is anything but calligraphic, but personal, subjective. Her figuration, even if made with technical skill, is not imitative, objective, but emotional, cared with passion, transport. Impetus, momentum, inclination and interest in the represented subject, these are the characteristics of her art."

Giulia Marcarini - Art Historian

"You can't overlook the color if you want to seriously get in touch with Katia Papaleo's painting; her canvases are built with tones, glazes, iridescent effects and brush strokes that make the surfaces vibrant with magical and evanescent atmospheres. This love for color betrays a training following Benito Trolese, an artist from whom Papaleo also inherits the fantastic, sometimes hallucinatory settings that pervade her canvases. However, her painting is never a timeless one, a mere exercise in style: forms, constructed with the sole aid of color, reflect the reality with which the artist continually collides, the personal or social dimension that she experiences with an intensity full of emotion. These are emotions, these feelings, carefully filtered by a painting that is first of all reflections, which burst, like the colors, in the paintings of Papaleo, reaching us with the disruptive force of an explosion."

Cav. Flavio De Gregorio (criticism of the work "The determination of the idealist") - Art critic and historian

"It is sensational how a pictorial structure, created by a master of contemporary art like Papaleo Katiuscia, can present the elaboration of the sign conditioned to the entire iconographic system, in a single and poetic visual assent. A beautiful and new painting in particular form and condition in which the female figure finds herself. The woman seeks her own balance that objectively pierces the imagination, in fact, it is with the moon that she struggles, as if to share her own first idea, in a coherent emotional conditioning that only an ideal remains. The vivacity of the artist promotes new ideas in art, visions imbued with elements, which, put together they create the dilemma cohesive by a perfect graphic strategy and which goes beyond the limits of space seen with figurative iconography."

Gabriel Ventrice - Literary

"An always sensitive and suggestive chromatism constitutes, in my opinion, the main feature of the poetic unfolding of the figurative production of the artist Katiuscia Papaleo.

The young painter already shows an excellent possession of technical and psychological skills that is transferred to the canvas, arousing intense emotions in the viewer.

The various objects ranging from still life to feline heads, from winged figures to meditative and melancholy scenes, are wrapped in a dreamlike and evocative atmosphere.

It would seem that the artist, through a meditated expressionism, wants to show the inner reality of her soul that often retains the dream and the memory of the past and no longer repeatable moments that can also be shared experiences of the user.

All this, never borders on drama, but often reaches the sphere of a nostalgia that is no longer renewable but so punctual as to be transferred to the canvas. "

Dott.ssa Francesca Mezzatesta - Historian and Art Critic

"Among the crystalline microspheres of color, the works of Katiuscia Papaleo shine with chromatic synaesthetic reflections and in the leitmotifs of her dancing rainbows, suspended polyphonies light up as in the pentagram of life, to which she often dedicates the primacy of “mater” . Her pictorial score is covered with dreams, memories and perceptions, where paths flow that evoke inner ways, merging real experiences of countless journeys around the world and dreamlike ones that emit the energy of the deep and transmit it in an empathic message to the observer.

Works that pulsate with kinetic vitality and unravel with beauty and harmony, sources of light that direct to ranges of golden breaths that propagate breaths of the color of the shining harmonium of the dawns that swallow the twilight.

A metaphor of the latter with respect to the "paths" of life where, almost with a thaumaturgic function, it transmits to the observer quite and reflection.

Narrative ranges of infinite intensity, conferring meditative "mantras", revisit the colors of the energy of the Kundalini Chakras opening up to the eye of the observer and emanate love for the radiant life of strength in the yellows / oranges, introspection of the blues up to the vital fluid and energizing of reds. The pictorial gesture emanates caressing effects of a spiritual nature, for her painting is a necessity, synonymous with absolute freedom of thought and total abandonment to what the brush receives in its dance within the color beyond any design restrictions. Her subjects inhabit and pulsate in a spectrum that requires "Steinherian" interior listening where art is a means of catharsis. Astral atmospheres and subjects with introspective symbols shed light in the darkness that sometimes engulfs the vision of the stars, K. manages to light up the flashes of a disruptive mortals in search of the ideal truth as in the work “ Il buio all’impovviso “ (Suddenly the darkness is a rainbow-ribbon, pushed by the currents of existence, which enters from the perspective , background like a suspended bridge , in which the woman dressed in the green colors of hope, like an equilibrist, proceeds with the mirror of her love pushed by a hand (her heart) she proceeds an exploratory access towards an unknown path, among thorny herbs, dedicated through painting as a prayer of love for the health of the mother. K.P. has always dedicated herself with passion and study to modern and contemporary art, the latter practiced with maturation and technical and not only expressive contributions both to the "Naviglio Grande" in Milan and to Magister Benito Trolese at the "Fucina delle Arti" , formerly a meeting point and talkative artistic exchanges with other members and excellent artists. Today she is the president of the Association and she continues it after her Master recognized her such as her spiritual and artistic heir

She has been active for more than a decade, both nationally and internationally in Exhibitions.

She won the 1st prize in the Sacred Art competition, in 2015 at the EXPO with the work "L’oro che nutre la vita” (the gold that feeds life), a work that gives the title seems to be linked to the last of poetic dedication to the mother, universal feelings in which everyone can find themselves in the intimate meaning for those who give life with love and receive it with the same beauty the same colors of "her" colored ribbon overlap mystical and mysterious of a timeless union to infinity."

Sandro Serradifalco - Art critic

"The surrealist painting of the artist Katiuscia PAPALEO is full of novelty and above all of personality, which finds its maximum expression in the works with an arcane, timeless flavor, which narrate stories, places and characters out of our time, pleasant, enchanted, which they seem to come from other dimensions, those of our dreams and our mind.

Surreal visions are the artist's works, full of meaning that Katiuscia PAPALEO let us know through her art. Her images undoubtedly spring from the culture that can be linked to surrealist iconography, from which however she differentiates for a personal and original attitude.

Her art forms, in fact retrace the tracks of a surreal representativeness; they possess the imprint of the dreamlike aura associated with surrealism, but are decidedly unique in terms of structure and from both a graphic and chromatic point of view.

A "visionary" painting that borders between the symbolizes and allusions of surrealism to create at the end something truly unique and sensational."

Atlante dell’Arte Contemporanea 2020 De Agostini – Artistic Comiytato

"...Analysing the corpus of the Milanese artist, it is clear that after an initial adherence to an academic figurative style, the joy of looking at the world with different eyes takes over. The stroke cut trough the surface of the canvas with confidence and defines captivating silhouettes that shake off the weight of formalism. Her gaze becomes sharper and more penetrating and does not stop at the first appearance.

What interests her is to go beyond the hidden reality. Papaleo states "Love for art is a feeling that belongs to you from birth. Either you have it or you don't. Drawings, pencils and paints have always been part of me, as well as the unstoppable need to communicate emotions through the colours and signs. Over the years I have learned even more to observe everything around me: people and things.

To understand what people are saying and what they actually mean. This helps my work a lot. The emotional and real interpretation of life, free from social, emotional or other constraints. Painting for me is pure freedom… everything else is life flowing ". The gradual departure from the mimetic figuration of the surrounding world is reduced to the creation, around 2016, of paintings in which the protagonists are carnival masks rendered with lenticular attention to detail and admirable chromatic effects. They are the expression of a metaphorical analysis of the fiction and counterfeiting of contemporary society. Progressively, the overcoming of the oppressive tamgemcy of reality is manifested through a chromatic explosion of intense vivacity. It is configured as a joyful flow which sweeps across the surface of the painting, saturating it and enveloping every available centimeter. The colour thus becomes the interpreter of the centrifugal force which, overwhelming the material, underlies the inventiveness. Violets, blues, reds or greens embody pure feelings, free from sedimented constraints, creating timeless emotional islands. A fine symbology that is never aggressive, but on the contrary delicate, seems to dance on the canvases, welcoming quick and decisive brushstrokes. The various shades perfectly match the limes of the sign line, configuring themselves as panoramas of the soul offered to the viewer.

It is no coincidence that the eyes of the subjects are often covered in Papaleo's works. The result of the procedure is expressed through suspended dimensions, bearers of a surrealist DNA, on which an accurate psychological investigation of human phenomenology insists. The theme of the mask as well as the symbolic one connected to rebirth intends to focus the reflection on the breaking down of barriers, in favour of a perceptive renovation, which inaugurates a new, deeper and more heartfelt reality. These representations are intended to lead the observer towards a more solid awareness of the conditions of the current world. In fact, overcoming the objective data implies the renunciation of any superficial frill, in order to emphasize the emotional newness. Visual poetics develops dreamlike plots, since only in the absurdity of the dream does the buried truth come out. Katiuscia Papaleo dematerializes the substance of form as this is the only way to enter into real empathy with the other. She does not renounce the object datum, but mainly shifts interest to its recondite signifier, placing the chromatic structure in a dynamic and organizational rhythm. The composition remains in the balance, it seems to be ready to melt into colour, but this does not happen, never giving in to totalizing abstraction. The roots with immanent continence remain in the transparency of the drawing, which is configured as an emotional container. The artist rejects the passive acceptance of the empty relationships of today's society, in favour of the rediscovery of a pure and natural positivism that harbours in each of us."

Cosimo Mero - Artistic Director of the Oratory of the Sant’Ambrogio Passion

“L’ Antico Oratorio della Passione” at Sant'Ambrogio’s cathedral in Milano, in the days from 25 January to 1 February 2020 welcomes the staff of Katia Papaleo who creates the exhibition "Contaminations" in the historic Ambrosian exhibition space , with a strong emotional impact .It is the result of Katia's passionate and rich artistic career that does not disregard her human sensitivity, the enthusiasm with which she creates her works rich in color and warmth, and in some cases even explosive effects capable of combining the abstract with the concrete, the idea of precognition with the figurative that objective it. The spark for her paintings often starst from realities lived, dreamed, from natural, exotic landscapes, visual and emotional memories that have become the heritage of her soul and that become in her paintings abstract or stylized figures, archetypes subjected to various potential metamorphoses. Against the heaviness of materiality, which weighs down everything, Katia contrasts the expressive lightness of art that she feels is a purely spiritual, indeed we could say mystical, activity. These pictorial subjects and related techniques are certainly a point of arrival, or rather, a conquest of balance between ethereal (but we could also say about soul ) forms and intensity of colour: an indication of a desire that goes beyond appearances? Isn't it true that our spiritual eyes perceive in a higher light people and objects captured by our material eyes?We just have to observe the works of Katia Papaleo and reflect on the declared "Contaminations" in the aforementioned days of their exhibition at the suggestive Ancient Oratory of the Passion in Sant’Ambrogio Cathedral."

Benito Trolese - Painter and Master of Art

"The title of Katia Papaleo's exhibition" The Box of Emotions "is the exact reflection of her personality: a box overflowing with emotions, colors, reflections of life, moods, loves.Joy of doing never separated from a bitter thread that always accompanies all true painters. Bitter thread that disturbs in "discussion", confrontation-clash, where the impetuousness and the urge to say comes before reason.When reflection weakens, there is the expressive instinct that imposes itself with strength and conviction. The sentiment in the "passionate composition" praised by reason and sensitivity as well as the whole of her work convince us. Hers is a rich and exuberant artistic personality."

Professor Egidio Maria Eleuteri - Art Historian Expert

"Katiuscia Papaleo is an artist in continuous commercial and cultural growth, whose art is original and above all unmistakable. Her artistic cycle is born from those" roots "that grow, unite, interpenetrate giving life to an almost musical story, developing , above all, a systematic, intense and constant research of lines, light, forces, colors, lyrical traits that converge, meet, amalgamate creating a splendid story. A story immersed in a highly poetic vision, enlivened by chromatic thicknesses recalling the primordial origins of the sign and the iris ".

Luigi Gattinara - Triennial Director of Photography

"Observing the work of Katiuscia Papaleo we are enchanted not only by the harmony of the colors, but also by the dreamlike meaning of the scenic representation and by the articulation of the perfect composition. The plasticity of the dress of the girl who "captures the moon" creates a sensation of lightness, accentuating its movement, which gradually becomes vibrant and strength itself in the power of the gesture. Katiuscia Papaleo's painting allows us to travel into our deepest unconscious, making our sweetest dreams, often those of our childhood, resurface in our memory, representing a sweeter and more ancestral world."

Monia Malinpensa - Art Director

"The painting of the artist Katiuscia Papaleo emanates an image full of vitality and imagination that defines fully her subject.

Modern figurative painting with a surrealist flavor that is capable of evoking images as fantastic as they are real in a happy and a rigorous blend of narration. She, using mixed techniques such as oil on canvas and canvas, cardboard with a personal draft, represents a pictorial result of vivid chromatism and synthesis of light. The shape is full of energy while the sign is full of content meanings. It is an idealistic and spiritual painting that gives the viewer a continuous dreamlike stimulus and human richness."

Salvo Nugnes - Art Director

"In the expressive painting of Katiuscia Papaleo, a visionary art is revealed to us, characterized by forms that recall our reality, but covered with articulated symbologies that allude to the surrealism of new timeless spaces. The themes represented on the canvas interpose still life with winged figures, highlighting the artist's great creative and inner elasticity. In her works, emotions intertwine with a deep chromatic study that faces the observer, amazed by the majestic dreamlike aura mixed with the extremely personal vision of the painter."

Marta Lock - Art Critic

The enchanted world of Katia Papaleo, suspended between magic and exciting intuition.

"Everything that belongs to irrationality tends to be put in the background compared to contingency, to the observation of what moves around the contemporary world with its problems, its fake freedoms that are actually cages within which the human being, and even more so the artist, moves to explore the deeper meanings, trapping himself in a mechanism of cause and effect that does not allow him to get out of that mental and emotional vortex. The artist I am going to tell you about today, on the other hand, uses the act of painting to bring out the magical side of the universe we inhabit, made up of subtle energies, characters and apparently ordinary objects that reveal the infinite possibilities of a parallel world in which everything can change its essence and be transformed.

Starting from the very last years of the 19th century, with the research on colour and emotion of the artists who contributed to theorizing the guidelines of Fauvism, taken up and elaborated in their less extreme meaning by the subsequent Expressionism, the need to escape from contingency began to emerge in some protagonists of the time, from a period in which class struggles and the subsequent winds of war induced some creatives with a particular sensitivity to seek an escape route, a way of distracting themselves from the happenings and the succession of events due to which the emotions absorbed could only be panic, fear, anxiety, anguish. This need to escape from reality had its greatest representative in Marc Chagall, whose playful, light atmospheres set in fairy-tale settings won over the public and experts alike precisely because of their ability to distract from an often too tiring, sad reality, and to draw the observer into that smiling, perhaps deliberately unconscious world in which to be simply happy. A few years later, that sense of innocence and pleasantness that emanated from the magic of existence, from those little emotions given by love, from the sensation of rising and flying above cities and landscapes with the same irrational desire of a child, were mitigated and linked to a greater sense of reality within which, however, the artists went in search of that very magic that was most manifest in Chagall; this new approach was defined Magic Realism and, although it was never a movement defined and determined by a manifesto, it had its greatest representatives in Felice Casorati in Italy, Christian Shad in Germany and George Tooker in the United States. It was especially in the United States that Magical Realism took on many of the surrealist themes, but gave predominance to the magic and atmosphere of fairytales and dreams, thus generating Pop Surrealism, which affected not only art but also cinema. The great director Tim Burton is part of this expressive current, as is the great painter Margaret Keene, who was in some ways a precursor of the new pictorial style, and then more recently Mark Ryden, whose unreal atmospheres range from the world of fairy tales to that of nightmares, constantly concealing an ironic vein of reality. Milanese artist Katia Papaleo bridges the gap between Magic Realism and Pop Surrealism by describing a world very close to the cinematic atmospheres of Tim Burton, in which fantastical and mysterious but always positive characters and objects revolve, almost as if the director, like Papaleo, were revealing their indulgence, their benevolence towards the oddities that come and go in an apparently random way in the life of each of us.

The range of colours chosen by the artist also harmonises with his way of observing circumstances, events and those details of existence that demonstrate a different meaning, often hidden yet evident to those who know how to look beyond it; things take on a living aspect, becoming metaphors of contemporary reality or, if observed from another point of view, they become a way of perceiving that link between objects and subtle energies that envelop the atmosphere that usually surrounds the individual without him being aware of it. The work Fermare il tempo (Stopping Time) cannot but bring to mind the Arabian amphorae in which precious oils are contained, narrated by Papaleo through tiny multicoloured particles and tiny golden fragments, almost as if they were gold ingots, underlining how important it is to consider the passing of events and life as a wonderful and unique experience; this is why it is necessary to realise how essential it is to savour each instant because it will inevitably slip away, despite man’s efforts to stop it, so as not to let a pleasant and joyful moment dissolve, but one that passes. Reflection on time is a theme addressed by Katia Papaleo from different angles, a concept that belongs to the present as much as to the past because it has always been an enigma, an unattainable chimera precisely because of its fleetingness, which does not belong to the point of view of the human being, who is often deludedly convinced that he can control it, that he can dispose of it as he pleases, only to have to reckon with everything that has passed much faster than he has been able to observe. In the painting Il tempo prezioso (The precious Time), the artist evokes a magical atmosphere, made up of shades of blue, the colour of dreams and imagination, in which a clock dominates an open door representing opportunities, chances to be grasped, attempts to be undertaken so as not to find oneself later regretting what was not seized. On the contrary, it seems to suggest to the observer how much beauty can be hidden beyond the decision to cross an unknown threshold, to find the courage to take that leap, to perform that action which can change the course of one’s entire existence.

Il matto che profuma di vita (The madman who smells of life) is an amusing character, resembling the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland, and represents the imagination inherent in each individual, which in some cases is transformed into creative strength, into an expressive capacity to tell of the emotions, sensations and colours that define the soul; the madman basically symbolises the artist, his inner world told through images in a universal language capable of reaching the observer by virtue of immediacy, who can see the light through the darkness and find the playful and amusing side of life, despite everything. In other paintings, those more linked to interior sensations, to fragments of memory or reality that are filtered through her deepest feelings, Papaleo moves towards Abstract Expressionism in which the colours become the protagonists and narrate the emotions, what is perceived with immediacy and what must come out with equal spontaneity, without the filter of the mind, without awareness, but with the sometimes childish impulsiveness of simply wanting to narrate what revolves in that delicate interiority that represents all that the human being has at his disposal not to lose himself in contingency.

The canvas Il cassetto dei sentimenti (The drawer of feelings) is part of this series, a veritable explosion of lively and vital colours, just like the emotions that come out of a sensitive and profound interiority that cannot remain silent in that limited space where we often wish to keep it for protection; the work seems to be an underground world, a secret garden in which sensations dance in a gentle but at the same time overwhelming way, underlining the strength and impetuousness of everything that leaves its mark on existence, of everything that paints life with the intensity necessary to make every event unforgettable. During her long artistic career, Katia Papaleo has taken part in more than seventy exhibitions, including group and solo shows, she has won numerous awards, in 2017 she was appointed Master of Art and in 2019 she was awarded an Honorary Degree by the Academy of Santa Sara in Alessandria; her artworks are included in important contemporary art catalogues and since 2018 she has been President of the Artangolo-Fucina delle Arti Cultural Association in Milan."

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