Institutional portal - Municipality of Milan

Guido Pajetta – Biographical notes
Guido Pajetta was born in Monza in 1898 into an ancient family of Venetian painters. In 1915 he began his artistic training at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan where, later, he was a student of Ambrogio Alciati.

In 1917 he volunteered in the assault troops for the first world war and took his leave in 1920. The war experience would have a devastating influence on him.

He finished his studies at the Brera Academy in 1922 with honorable mention and began his career in the Milanese artistic environment, combining the late nineteenth-century school of maestro Alciati with family tradition.

He met two artists who would mark his turning point from academicism to modernity: Anselmo Bucci and Mario Sironi, founders of "Novecento" and bringers of a truly solid European culture to Milan. He participated in the Venice biennials of 1928, 1930 and 1932 and in the Rome art quadriennial of 1931 and 1935. In parallel to his exhibition career, Pajetta established himself in the main private galleries of the time: Galleria Milano, il Milione and Gian Ferrari. In these years he also met Lucio Fontana, who had returned from Argentina, with whom he formed a friendship that would bind them for a long time.

The turning point that the meeting with Sironi and "Novecento" generates in Pajetta is of great importance. The cultural balance shifts from Venetian colorism to the volumetric synthesis of Masaccio and Piero della Francesca, central painters in the debate within Novecento Italiano. In the cycle of paintings in which Sironi's influence is evident, there is however no shortage of entirely personal experiences which concern both a brighter colorism - often fantastic and unreal - and a form which, apparently of volumetric synthesis, upon careful observation becomes reveals generated by color, as per Venetian tradition.

In 1934 he made his first trip to Paris in search of cultural contacts and possible exhibition venues. In the subsequent long stays in France, until 1939, Pajetta had cultural experiences that would give a turning point to his work. For the first time he observed with amazement the light of the Impressionists and carefully studied the paintings of the first European avant-garde, in particular the Cubism of Picasso and Braque and the Fauve painting of Matisse and Dufy. He also looks with keen interest at the works of Max Ernst, Dalì and De Chirico.

Returning to Milan in 1938, he married Maria Panizzutti, his model. From this union three sons were born.

From 1942 - the year of the first bombing of Milan - Pajetta moved with his wife and children to Tremezzo on Lake Como, returning with his family to Milan in 1946. From the idyllic world of Lake Como Pajetta found himself in a hungry city and destroyed by bombings, with scenarios animated by a desperate humanity. From this moment his painting violently changes register and loses all lightness. The color becomes dark, in the rediscovery of black, while the language becomes elementary, primitive.

Between the end of the 40s and the early 60s he exhibited in Milan, Paris and also in London, where he came into contact with the English figuration expressed by artists such as Henry Moore, Francis Bacon and Graham Sutherland. These European experiences lasted until 1963, when he decided to exhibit only at the Galleria del Lauro in Milan.

1967 marks an important turning point in his life and his painting: he abandons the large studio in via Cadore and "holed up" in a small house-studio in the beloved Brera district, in via Tessa 1, where he begins a new experimentation with the acrylic color technique. This system allows him to express, in an "innocent" way, his own psychic dynamics and interpretative gestures.

In 1981 he contracted a serious joint disease which forced him to have long periods of inactivity resulting in worsening of his depression. From this moment his work undergoes the final turning point. His works become the mirror for the painter to read his own intimate condition and alternate, in an antithetical way, vitalistic explosions and feelings of suffering and pain.

Pajetta died in 1987 in Milan.

Guido Pajetta – Topics
In the different phases of his work, among the themes dearest to the artist, we find the portrait which, inherited from family tradition, became decidedly more introspective and critical after the Second World War, leading to a true obsession with the self-portrait. Instead, still life dominated the late Thirties and early Forties, becoming a theme that would accompany Pajetta's entire artistic career. The variety of objects, from fruit to vases, from chair to cloth, has the task of representing the human condition in all its precariousness and allows the artist to escape, at least apparently, from his obsessions.

At the beginning of the 1930s, references to classicism and myth also intensified in a figuration that on the one hand revealed an affinity with the poetics of Carrà and Sironi and on the other expressed a tendency to move away from the conformist rhetoric of the time.

It is then the mask, as a metaphor for life and an increasingly painful human condition, that bursts into art as a representation of war, suffering and anxiety.

The other great pictorial theme of Pajetta's work is the female figure which, however, is never the object of flat idealization but rather the tool for a profound reading of everyday reality. In his paintings, irony plays an anti-rhetorical role, aimed at exorcising the wounds of the spirit, which is why particular domestic animals are often placed alongside the female nude.

Finally, it is through a singular poetic reading of the landscape that Pajetta increasingly expresses the desire to go beyond the conformism of this genre to move towards a distant and other world. It is in this theme that he seeks an authentically free space and the entrance into fantastic and super-temporal places.