From November 5, 2025 to March 1, 2026, Palazzo Mazzetti in Asti will host the exhibition Paolo Conte. Original, an exhibition project promoted by Fondazione Asti Musei and Arthemisia, curated by Manuela Furnari, essayist and author of the main critical studies on Conte’s work, with the collaboration of Fondazione Egle e Paolo Conte and REA Edizioni Musicali. The exhibition represents the largest retrospective ever dedicated in Italy and abroad to the celebrated Piedmontese musician, offering an immersion in his figurative universe through 143 works on paper executed with different techniques, spanning nearly seventy years. Away from the lights of the stage, Paolo Conte cultivated a reserved passion for painting and drawing from a young age. Trained as a painter before he was a musician, he has always maintained a deep connection with the image, understood as a parallel tool of expression. The exhibition traces his visual journey with a chronological and thematic approach, offering a novel reading of his poetics.
Among the works on display are works never before shown to the public, such as Higginbotham from 1957, a tempera and ink dedicated to one of the first great jazz trombonists. The musical reference is not accidental: music, in its many declinations, constitutes the matrix of each of Conte’s graphic gestures. Lines, signs and colors follow an internal rhythm, an intonation that returns on paper the same melancholic and ironic cadence that animates his verses. A central core of the exhibition is devoted to Razmataz, a work entirely written, set to music and drawn by Conte. Set in 1920s Paris, the story revolves around the disappearance of a dancer and becomes a pretext for recounting the arrival in Europe of jazz, a symbol of a new musical and cultural freedom. On display are some of the more than 1,800 plates that make up the project, evidence of complex work and graphic research that recalls the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century.
“A period,” said the artist, “charged with sensuality and an immediate danceability that sets it apart.”
The third section of the itinerary is devoted to a series of works on black cardboard, where the artist relies on the evocative power of line and color. In these works we find discreet homages to classical music, jazz, literature and art, always filtered through a personal gaze, at times ironic but strictly faithful to his own vision. The set of works builds a coherent and unmistakable landscape, in which the visual component becomes an integral part of a poetics that combines image, word and sound. The exhibition route follows a careful but deliberately free logic, the result of the direct participation of Paolo Conte, who contributed to the selection and arrangement of the works. The exhibition is conceived as a journey through his imagination, where each work refers to a musical or narrative suggestion. “Leaving the public the possibility to imagine with maximum freedom” is the indication that the artist wanted to place at the basis of the entire project.
Furnari has constructed a path that relates figurative and musical production, emphasizing how both share the same lyrical and formal tension. It is an investigation into the coherence of a language that spans decades without ever yielding to fashion. The exhibition is realized with the contribution of the Ministry of Culture - General Directorate for Libraries and Cultural Institutes, the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Asti, the Piedmont Region and the City of Asti, with the patronage of the Province of Asti and the support of Fondazione CRT. The main sponsor is the Bank of Asti, while La Stampa is the initiative’s media partner. The title Original is a statement of poetics. Paolo Conte is an author refractory to any classification, capable of building over time a visual and sonic language that proceeds by assonances, evocations and memories. The characters that populate his papers and the landscapes that surface in them are part of an intimate, often melancholy repertoire that refers back to his musical texts and expands their meaning.
Paolo Conte was born in Asti on January 6, 1937, into a family of notary tradition. During his high school and college years he formed his first small jazz groups, playing as a trombonist, vibraphonist and pianist. He described his generation as those “of jazz lovers,” drawn to the harmony and rhythm of a music that represented for many a true school of freedom. A law graduate, he practiced law for a time, but in parallel he approached the recording scene in Rome and then Milan, writing songs that would become hits for other performers. These include Azzurro (1968) for Adriano Celentano, Insieme a te non ci sto più for Caterina Caselli and Tripoli 1969 for Patty Pravo.
In 1974 and 1975 he released his first two albums as a songwriter and performer, both entitled Paolo Conte. His rough voice, unique phrasing and lyrics of refined poetry immediately placed him in a singular position in Italian songwriting. This was followed by works that have now become classics: Un gelato al limon (1979), Paris milonga (1981), Appunti di viaggio (1982), Aguaplano (1987), Parole d’amore scritto a macchina (1990), Novecento (1992), Una faccia in prestito(1995), Reveries (2003), Psyche (2008), Nelson (2010), Snob (2014) and Amazing Game (2016).
His career spans the world’s most prestigious stages, from the Olympia in Paris to the Blue Note in New York to the Philharmonie in Berlin. In 2018 he releases a double album recorded at the Baths of Caracalla and in 2021 a live performance at the Reggia di Venaria. On February 19, 2023, he became the first singer-songwriter in the world to perform on stage at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala, in a concert that sold out in just a few hours.
In the same year he exhibited his drawings at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, a reconfirmation of a passion for painting cultivated since childhood. An interest that found a synthesis in the multimedia work Razmataz (2000), entirely written, set to music and illustrated by the artist, and subsequently exhibited at the Barbican in London, the Correr Museum in Venice and other Italian venues between 2000 and 2007. With Paolo Conte. Original, Palazzo Mazzetti in Asti now offers a reinterpretation of that journey, offering the public an opportunity to discover the more visual and lesser-known dimension of one of the great protagonists of contemporary Italian culture.
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| Paolo Conte painter: a journey through the singer-songwriter's visual universe at Asti's Palazzo Mazzetti |
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