Paolo Ferrari

Scientist, humanist, artist and musician, psychotherapist. In 1980 he founded the Centro Studi Assenza, seat of the scientific-cultural association of the same name and the multidisciplinary team he directs (www.centrostudiassenza.org).

After theoretical and experimental work, he published the research novel Paolo and his companion without death (1978) with the Apollinaire editions of the homonymous direct gallery Guido Le Noci, entering the artistic and literary debate of those years. He begins his artistic activity with experimental photography, followed by drawings in pencil and India ink on paper (late 70s), pastels from the series "The Little Humans" (early 80s), works on plexiglass and wood in multiple layers with photocopies and graph paper - the series of "The Great Humans" and "Defeats".
The works on canvas, acrylic and mixed media from the late 1980s and the following decade. At the beginning of 2000 he began designing outdoor installations: large works (2m x 3m) characterized by a specific transition from analogue to digital in which digital printing (on PVC) is processed with further stratification ( Duplication) in mixed media with digitized graph paper collage. The presence of transparent graph paper refers to the scientific method - from which each work derives consistently with its basic formation - and to the intangibility of reality whose representation is put in check.
We remember the Genoa Porto exhibition 1964 - 2000 Palazzo San Giorgio, Genoa Double in-Absence by Paolo Ferrari from photographs by Lisetta Carmi, curated by Uliano Lucas. In September 2007 he is present at the contemporary art and Italian design exhibition Artour-O in Shanghai (China). He started the multi-year Cinemassenza project (2007-2011) with Patrizia Brighi. As an artist-scientist he designs and creates Places / Contrade, site-specific installations aimed at the quality of work and living-thinking such as the installation-dematerializing doubling in-Absence 1998-2003 in a robotic factory in Valenza (AL) (I Raddoppi in-Assenza by Paolo Ferrari, Skira, 2001) finalist at the Guggenheim Prize for Impresa e Cultura 1999 and the installation Terre-splendenti (2007).
He collaborates with Architettura delle Convivenze in artistic-scientific-architectural operations in social self-construction projects (La Casa del Cavaliere-Errante. Il Dado in Settimo Torinese, To, 2009). He deals with the new interrelationships between architecture, art, science and territory. He designs and creates with the team of the Centro Studi Assenza the artistic-scientific installations in progress A new landscape feeds the traveler: Nature - Narration / Abstraction - Transfiguration (2014), permanent in the territories of Gaggiano and Cisliano; Reflections (with-writing) of the city to-come (2016) at the Darsena in Milan. The architectural-artistic project Houses beyond the threshold (2018-20) in houses for unaccompanied minors.
He has published, among other things, the collective volume Psyche, art and care territories (2010); the scientific poem De Absentiae Natura. Around the birth of another Universe (2015); most recently Opusminus-0. The book of missing (2019).