Paolo Di Diego

Paolo Di Diego Biography

Germany, born 1975

I was not born a painter, nor I was raised as one.

But then the pandemic came, a watershed moment in life.

And so painting became a therapeutic medium to vent my anguish and cleanse my days from the burden of confinement.

It became an attempt to imprison my disquiet on a canvas, even though I knew it was like trying to grasp at rays of sunlight.

Eventually, painting became something else.

It became the expression of my emotional growth. Growth which came to me through personal experience; from becoming a father to being owner of a bar in Berlin, a privileged position from which to observe humankind

My study and readings have led me to the conclusion, to quote Füssli, that "art is the product of a depraved culture, in which knowledge itself is the real foundation of seeing"

My subjects are born from suffering, from addictions and from the misery of humanity. From the corruptibility of the flesh and the glacification of the soul.

They are children of my spleen. Misfits in a world that has lost any connection to the sacred, to divinity, intimacy, infinity, solemnity, or to the sublime.

A world in which the obsession with the results has led to the death of the soul.

(Paolo Di Diego, February 2023)