PESCIA.- Primitive Viscerality, a major new exhibition dedicated to Italian artist Paolo Tesi, has opened at the Fondazione POMA Liberatutti in Pescia, where it will remain on view through May 24, 2026. The exhibition was inaugurated on February 26 in the presence of the artist, marking his seventieth exhibition and reaffirming his longstanding, independent path within Italian contemporary art.

Born in Pistoia in 1945, Tesi has built a career that deliberately resists labels and fixed categories. Trained between Pistoia and Florence, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts while also attending the Faculty of Letters at the University of Florence, where literary figures such as Alessandro Parronchi and Luigi Baldacci influenced his intellectual development. Painter, printmaker and illustrator, Tesi has often described himself as a “painter with the temptation to write” — a definition that captures the deep interplay between image and language that runs through his work.

That tension is unmistakable in Primitive Viscerality. The exhibition brings together 27 large-scale works created in 2025 specifically for the show: ten vivid ink-on-paper pieces and seventeen monochrome wax pastel drawings. Installed across expansive surfaces, the works feel less like isolated compositions and more like immersive visual fields, where marks accumulate, overlap and dissolve in a continuous flow.

At the heart of the project lies the concept that gives the exhibition its title: a “primitive viscerality” that seems to emerge from deep within the body. Dreams, emotional states, visions and hallucinations surface throughout the drawings — not as literal imagery, but as intense layers of signs, gestures and recurring letters. Words appear only to be absorbed by dense constellations of strokes. The page becomes a site of struggle between expression and erasure.

Tesi has described his process as driven by a restless inner force. When he begins to draw, he has said, a subtle anxiety fills the studio, compelling his hand forward. One sheet of paper is never enough; he moves rapidly from one surface to another, searching for a result that might finally satisfy him — perhaps an unattainable ideal. “I am voracious,” he has written. That voracity is visible in every surface, where the density of marks suggests urgency rather than resolution.

Rather than presenting a calm or reconciled narrative, Primitive Viscerality exposes the act of creation itself. The exhibition foregrounds drawing as a field of conflict — suspended between accumulation and cancellation, between the desire to form meaning and the impossibility of ever reaching a definitive conclusion.

Over the decades, Tesi has maintained a steady and autonomous course, exhibiting widely in Italy and abroad while also engaging in cultural life as a curator, educator and founder of the art and literature magazine Ombrone. For more than fifteen years, he taught drawing in Italy and Germany, continuing to navigate freely between visual art and literary thought. That intellectual breadth is evident in the way his drawings often resemble script — charged with narrative impulse, yet hovering just beyond readability.

Accompanying the exhibition is a catalogue published by Edizioni Fondazione POMA Liberatutti in the PomArte series, edited by Marta Convalle and featuring critical essays by Rosa Pierno and Anna Brancolini.

Primitive Viscerality is open to the public Wednesday through Saturday from 10:00 am to 12:30 pm and 5:30 pm to 10:00 pm, and on Sundays from 10:00 am to 12:00 pm and 5:30 pm to 10:00 pm. Admission is free.

With this exhibition now underway, Paolo Tesi offers visitors not a finished story, but an encounter with drawing as necessity — an urgent, bodily search for meaning that continues long after the page is filled.