PREVIEW: Paolo Colombo-Music and Mosaics
Paolo Colombo illustrates with exactness a lyrical series of moments in his paintings, each holding the intensity of a world. Working with watercolors and pencil drawings. Colombo balances his simple language with a highly technical visual method. Word-based and image-focused works are illuminated through fundamental forms such as the dot, the line, and the square. Paolo Colombo’s passion for texture together with an appreciation for Byzantine and folk arts is also alive in the works.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Bernier/Eliades Gallery Archive
Paolo Colombo’s art invites a slow, solitary encounter, the kind of attention one gives a well-loved book. Working primarily in watercolour and pencil, he builds his images from a personal “grammar and syntax” of lines, squares, and faint figurative traces. Soft washes of colour and the delicate shimmer of chequered patterns unfold into dreamlike meditations that often carry fragments of his own poetry. Animals, hands, and fleeting silhouettes appear and disappear across the paper like half-remembered stories. Colombo’s recent exhibition “Music and Mosaics“ at Bernier/Eliades Gallery in Athens brought this quiet language into dialogue with sound and architecture. The show combined three sound installations, clusters of floor mosaics, six large watercolours, and portraits of Greek musicians, creating an environment where image, rhythm, and history resonated together. These works reflect his enduring affection for Greek folk traditions and the popular music of the early twentieth century. Drawing inspiration from Greek, Roman, and Byzantine mosaics, he composes with almost architectural discipline: intersecting lines evoke the folds and translucence of fabric, allowing figures and symbols reminiscent of antiquity to surface. For Colombo, painting is more than representation; it is a poetic act, an extension of language through image. His art moves fluidly between scholarly reference and vernacular culture. Though steeped in the past, it retains a modernist clarity—spare, essential, and unmistakably contemporary. Born in Turin in 1949, Colombo studied Languages and Literature at the University of Rome and began exhibiting in the mid-1970s. By 1977 he had become the first European artist to show at New York’s PS1. Yet in 1986 he set aside his own studio practice to embark on a distinguished curatorial career, directing Geneva’s Centre d’Art Contemporain, curating the 1999 Istanbul Biennial, and serving as curator at MAXXI in Rome. Two decades later, he returned to making art, carrying with him a curator’s sensitivity to history, space, and dialogue. Today Colombo lives in Athens, where the luminous landscape and deep cultural strata continue to shape his work. Recent exhibitions include “The Second Time” at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2024–25). His paintings reside in major collections such as the Bénaki Museum, the Hammer Museum, Istanbul Modern, and the Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania. Whether on paper or in mosaic, Colombo’s images whisper rather than declare. They are at once ancient and immediate, merging the precision of craft with the lyricism of poetry—a reminder that art, like language, is most powerful when it speaks softly but lingers long.
Photo: Paolo Colombo, Lavender (detail), 2024, Watercolour, 112 x 75 cm, © Paolo Colombo, Photo: Paul Salveson, Courtesy Bernier/Eliades Gallery
Info: Bernier/Eliades Gallery, 11 Eptachalkou Str., Athens, Greece, Duration: 25/9-8/11/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-18:30, Sat 12:00-16:00, https://bernier-eliades.com/
