Reviews

…Rossetto refined his skills by portraying landscapes and still lifes, eventually weaving a surrealist dialogue between the human figure and the tree. His work notably features an exploration into the essence of womanhood, constantly interlaced with natural themes and symbols.
His body of work poignantly expresses the anguish and the needs of the new millennium—an era that inherits the weight of existentialism and Nietzschean vision. In every piece, the artist represents emotional states, existential conditions, and natural themes, deepening the incessant dialogue between humanity and nature. The tree is a constant presence and the common thread throughout Paolo Rossetto’s paintings; appearing as both a botanical and an anthropomorphic figure, it serves as a testament that no barriers exist between species.
Drawing from surrealist inspiration, Rossetto searches for truth. He is well-acquainted with diverse visions of nature, investigating it through an unconscious lens as the place from which humanity originates and to which it ultimately returns.
Sgarbi defines him as a “harmonious and refined” painter.

Paolo Rossetto’s painting leans heavily on the fundamental foundations of drawing. His works, chiseled with meticulous detail, delve deep into the mysteries of the soul. Through his art, Rossetto narrates the profound bond between nature and humankind, capturing every nuance of the female spirit with singular pictorial skill.
He describes every facet—from the simplest to the most complex—balancing harmony and beauty, sensuality and the mystery of female forms and faces. These figures are integrated in perfect equilibrium within tree trunks and branches, transporting the viewer into a surreal reality charged with primordial emotions that reconnect us with our deepest essence.
Wood is the undisputed protagonist of Rossetto’s artistic journey—a living element capable of transmitting and generating energy, warmth, and well-being. Alongside Woman—the “Domina,” lady, and mother—they stand as the twin forces that generate life and connect us to the whole.
Trees teach us the essential: they are patient, they are wise, and they always await the right season, the right time. If they had voices, they could tell us the secrets of nature, educating us and teaching us never to surrender in the face of adversity.

The painting style of Paolo Rossetto places a heavy emphasis on the foundations of drawing. His works, chiseled with meticulous detail, delve deep into the mysteries of the soul. His is a symbolist surrealism that looks toward the traditions of pictorial art while searching for the secret of human identity.

Learned citations from the past alternate with imaginative solutions of anthropomorphic forms; images of faces and bodies take the shape of botanical elements. In this way, the living being is mirrored in a world that is only inanimate in appearance. What the artist seems to suggest, in fact, is that life exists even within the smallest particle of matter.

“A seductive gaze heralds a contemporary Eve, framed by a barren branch—the restless offerer of the biblical apple.”

The relationship between human beings and nature is a blurred and sublime boundary. They belong to each other, even if their forms differ—the former limited and overbearing, the latter immense and generous. In the panels of Paolo Rossetto, they become one: inseparable and evocative.
This concept draws its inspiration from the Ovidian myth of Daphne, transformed into a laurel tree to escape the pursuit of the god Apollo, yet the tension here is entirely new. D’Annunzio’s verses capture the nymph’s shock and fear as she watches her body undergo metamorphosis:

“In the dampness of the wild greeting / she feels her feet become twisted roots / and from them a trunk rise / enclosing her legs up to her thighs / turning skin into bark / and where the flower of virginity lies / an inviolable knot is formed.”

While D’Annunzio highlights the terror of the change, in Rossetto’s works, the transformation is serene, accepted, and complete.
Born in Bolzano in 1968, Paolo Rossetto’s life has led him to explore many places, savor different cultures, and observe the work of fascinating artists. It was by watching the movement of those talented hands that the desire to become an artist himself was born. He abandoned his accounting studies to enroll in the Art Institute of Trento, letting himself be carried away by a love for drawing and painting.
After debuting with landscapes and still lifes, Rossetto began to portray human profiles—women, primarily—until he magically merged the genres.
An artist of clear figurative ancestry, Rossetto has reached his creative maturity in recent years. Following in the footsteps of René Magritte and Paul Delvaux, he has arrived at the enchanted worlds of Surrealism. His artistic research starts from a fundamental premise: that nature generates life in the same measure as the female body. His goal is to uncover that shared secret.

“A long and heartfelt dialogue between man and nature,” the artist explains.
He presents a kaleidoscope of bodies—predominantly female—made of flesh and bark, faces and branches, legs and leaves, all without interruption. The result is harmonious and refined.
Never satisfied in his quest for knowledge to fuel his projections of moods and existential conditions, Rossetto navigates both ancient and modern techniques. He uses:Tempera, oils, and acrylics, charcoal, powdered pigments (following the same procedures used by 14th-century masters)

Through these mediums, he delineates fusions of dream and reality: a newborn nursed by a tree with forms reminiscent of a breast; Mother Nature with a delicate female profile whose hair transitions into a spiral trunk; and groups of women whose limbs and hair extend into infinite branches.

Halfway between an evocation and a ghost, the figure of Paolo Rossetto appears from behind. The man is framed by the gnarled, withered branches of trees, whose undulating motion echoes the curves of his skeleton, the bones of his thorax, and his entire chiastic posture in perfect Polyclitean balance.
Like an Athenian statue, the weary, bowed silhouette asserts itself in a serpentine curve through the air; amidst those barren boughs, he seems the animula vagula blandula of Virgil’s Polydorus or Dante’s suicidal Pier.

We must therefore state that the painting of Paolo Rossetto is highly compelling due to its use of the symbol. It is worth recalling that, as Dardano notes, a symbol is an “object, material element, person, animal, or depiction that represents something else—most often an entity or an abstract value.”
This abstract value is evidently an ethical one; that is to say, ethico-political, since—as Aristotle asserts from the very first page of the Nicomachean Ethics—ethics and politics are one and the same. From this, we can deduce that the work of the painter, sculptor, writer, or musician is an ethico-aesthetic activity rather than a merely decorative pursuit for mercantile ends—that is, the production of objects for sale for the sole purpose of self-sustenance or enrichment.
Such a value is therefore inseparably linked to the “representation of the existential conditions” of man (as Rossetto rightly puts it), deeply understood through identification. This occurs in man’s relationship with nature which, according to Worringer, cannot be anything other than nature = society, given that nature is historical; thus, nature acts as a symbol of society. It is a society that many today have reasonable grounds to consider not a mother, but a “stepmother” to man—the “political animal” (zoon politikon). As Aristotle teaches, man is an animal born and living as a historically determined being within a historically given society; he is, therefore, a “cultural animal,” as the great nineteenth-century philosophers maintain.
Consequently, the “dialogue” Rossetto speaks of between man and nature is, in effect, a dialogue between man and man, between man and society. This dialogue is necessarily ethico-political—not merely political—and inherently historico-critical.
In conclusion, we must say that Rossetto is one of the rare contemporary artists who has successfully taken the difficult but correct path. He rejects the “fashionable” art directed by the prevailing amalgam of bureaucracy, academia, and the market (dominant since roughly 1948). He further rejects the condemnation of communicative language—language which, as Giambattista Vico suggests, necessarily employs objects (figuration) for linguistic ends to construct discourse and convey a message. Instead, Rossetto bases his work on the necessary knowledge of oneself and, by extension, of others; he relies on that “excavation” of the self—as Ungaretti teaches—an excavation sine die, intended to bring to light the profound emotions that define one’s personality.

Born from the folds of the visible and the atmosphere of dreams, the painting of Paolo Rossetto unfolds as an oneiric exploration, driven by the possible combinations of natural elements: human and vegetable, water, air, earth, and fire. Nature and color serve as the stage for repeated metamorphoses, captured in different moments of their slow evolution.
His panels are populated by women of fascinating appearance whose transformation is often difficult to decipher: from female to tree or from tree to female, caught as they are in an indeterminate instant of change.
This dominant female image—mysterious, diaphanous, yet at times intensely vital in her harmonious nudity—appears involved in a process of vegetable metamorphosis. Limbs or torsos give way to tree trunks branching out into the earth or immersed in a “non-place,” suspended in a dimension where temporal logic is dismantled. These women become arcane yet living creatures: contemporary vestals of a boundary-crossing between dream and fantasy.
Rossetto experiences the contemporary not as current events, but as immutable time. In this space, the perpetual cycle of mutation and the illusoriness of forms link humanity to nature in an almost organic continuity.

• Nature as Memory: Nature is understood as a throbbing archive of past stories, where one can sense the presence of a mythical creature within a tree, a fruit, or a stone.
• The “Here and Now”: Geometric inserts signal the present moment, while the features of the faces occasionally provide the relevance of the “now” as a distinctive element.

His fantasy is at times light and fleeting like a dream, and at others substantial and sensual. It dwells on the spectacular history of mutations that the artist himself contemplates with awe, enchantment, or sorrow for the suffering of creatures consciously changing their form.
There is a sharp sense of transience here—the mutability of what appears to the senses and then suddenly decomposes to become something else. Rossetto highlights both the sudden shift and the gradual slowness—the often painful persistence of the “old nature” within the new. He senses the intimate grief of the human being becoming “other” in a transmutation that seems to strike the very roots of the universe.
The world Rossetto delineates reveals unexpected dimensions: the brilliant play of surfaces is accompanied by a restless sensitivity. These creatures live in a nature betrayed by man—wounded, tampered with, and destroyed. In this “denatured” world, transformation seems to be the only way out of an impossible situation. By becoming something else, they finally find their redemption.

Literary Echoes: One cannot help but recall Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the source of all subsequent transfigurative fantasies—from Dante to D’Annunzio’s Alcyone, where the protagonist seems to turn into a plant among plants.
Rossetto explicitly looks to Magritte and Delvaux. From Surrealism, he retains the mysterious contradiction between the dominant fantastic theme and representative realism—a technical mastery free from the constraints of pure form, bent instead toward depicting images with the indeterminate consistency of dreams. Even when drawing from Biblical themes (such as Before the Sin or Adam and Eve), the vegetable element is never absent, signaling an indelible harmony with nature and its forms.

Rossetto expresses the surreal, the unconscious, and the dream within his paintings. At the center of his works stands the tree—which for him represents the Tree of Life. It becomes an expression of life and death, birth and decline, guilt and its atonement, Eros and Thanatos, and the Garden of Eden where sin does not exist.
From this Tree of Life, a woman is always born: the woman who gives birth to and guards life, but also the woman who seduces—sensual and playful—who, like Eve, bites the apple, representing either sin or liberation.In his Manifeste du surréalisme, André Breton described the dream and the vision of madness as a valid form of reality, just as legitimate as thoughts and feelings controlled by the intellect. Rossetto does not dissolve these contrasts between dream and reality; instead, he expands the emotional and expressive depth of his work.
Just as the Surrealists utilized new techniques for their art, Rossetto applies modern methods alongside traditional ones. In his paintings:

• The perspective of reason dissolves.
• In the magical branching of objects, the surreal subject takes on the primary meaning.
• The external, physical world is replaced by the reality of the soul.

“We have always been accustomed to dividing nature into three kingdoms: animal, vegetable, and mineral. Rossetto destroys the boundaries and barriers between these kingdoms to present us with a single universe of which we, too, are a part.”

“Closely mentored by masters Giuliano Brancaleoni and Kurt Mitterdorfer, Paolo Rossetto carries out a deep and highly personal inner search. Nature and the woods are his sources of inspiration, but it is the trees of his homeland that serve as the vital symbol; from them, the figures representing the essential periods and moments of life take shape.”

“In a new floral style, the tree stands as the central subject of her compositions, its essence defined by the curl of its line. She portrays the tree’s symbolic objects—its nature as a cross, a bridge between heaven and earth. She accentuates the significant tensions of history and life, drawing profound analogies with the human being…”

“The recurring leitmotif, ever-present, is the tree: a woody essence, stripped bare in its articulations and growth—from the root to the trunk, from the trunk to the branches, and to the branches of the branches. It is both a botanical tree and an anthropomorphic one, but also a highly symbolic element in its contortions, moving through the entire painting—sometimes as the protagonist, at other times with balanced discretion.”