Eric Pagliano

Eric Pagliano
Period: 2011-2012
Profession: Art historian Eric Pagliano is
connaisseur . His main activity is to bring out of anonymity Italian, French and Nordic drawings dating from the modern period (15th-18th centuries), generally preparatory to works of art (paintings, sculptures, etc.). This work of naming goes hand in hand with a questioning of the very foundations of attribution (how does one arrive at a name?) and a study of the genesis of works (how is it constructed in and through drawing?), a dual approach that permeates his entire approach to drawing. His Roman project aims to compare graphic writing methods and work processes at work in the creation of iconographic devices based on a single subject (in this case, the Descent from the Cross) by three strictly contemporary painters/drawers from different regions of Italy in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The aim: to understand how a subject rooted in iconographic tradition is renewed in the very expression and appropriation of that tradition; to understand how, starting from the same
inventio inscribed in a
dispositional memory, three artists produce three different and original devices. This is the full meaning of Nicolas Poussin’s famous phrase, which serves as
motto for this undertaking: “Novelty in painting does not consist in a new subject, but in its good and new disposition, and thus, from common and old, the subject becomes singular and new”.