Mimmo Paladino | Massimo de Carlo
“My culture has always been rooted in a certain Mediterranean spirit, but also in darkness, in folk legends,” says Mimmo Paladino. The Italian artist has brought some of this spirit to the chintzy upstairs space of Massimo de Carlo in London, with some sinister installations using bronze, wood and gold.
The standout is the untitled work pictured below. It centres on a painting on board, backed by gold leaf, like an International Gothic saint’s portrait. The painting’s subject is a turned-away head, impaled by a gold-leafed tree branch, stuck violently out into the gallery.
The painting is surrounded by 90 gold leaf squares in perfect grid formation: Massimo de Carlo’s notes reveal this is a tribute to the Renaissance geometry of artists like Piero della Francesca. But the overall effect is truly pagan: it’s like an altarpiece, a backing for god knows what kind of sacrificial rituals.
This work reminded me of another altarpiece-like installation, executed by another Italian veteran, also on show across town. I’d seen it earlier in the week.
It’s by Giuseppe Penone, who started working a decade or so earlier than Paladino, in the 1960s. He’s one of the founders of arte povera: a movement that prized working with humble materials above all.
Penone’s favoured medium is wood, specifically trees, which he’s described as “a prime example of a perfect sculpture”. In Alberi libro (’Book Trees’ - pictured above), from 2017 and on show in the main room at the Serpentine galleries, a series of bare trunks are hollowed out, and intricately carved with twig like forms that climb up up up to the sky. They look like the bellows of some kind of celestial forest organ.
This altarpiece seems spiritually uplifting and rooted in nature, where Paladino’s is mathematically man-made. But both centre on the natural geometry provided by our trees. Both are - as I said before - deeply pagan. Both are worth seeing this May, with the trees in full leaf.
Mimmo Paladino is at Massimo de Carlo (London). 29 April - 28 May 2025. Giuseppe Penone: Thoughts in the Roots is at Serpentine South (London). 03 April - 07 September 2025