Interesting and enjoyable interview with Paolo Girardi, a.k.a. Madman, the Italian artist known worldwide for his record illustration work done for so many metal music bands.
Girardi talks about his love for painting, his influences, his inspirations, how the macabre and romanticism are important aspects of life and all that he transfers into his works... stunning works, with a seventeenth-century base, that seem to open a gateway to parallel worlds in which dreams, death, and life are delicately immortalized with warm and dark colors.
Paolo Girardi's works are the projection of his visionary mind, the reflection of his world in which it is easy to lose oneself to savor an art indebted to other times.
L: Who is Paolo Girardi?
P: Paolo Girardi is me, an Italian painter -- a craftsman, fortunately. I am not an artist.
L: In the environment you are known as Paolo "Madman" Girardi. Why the choice of this stage name?
P: By now I am known throughout the metal (especially extreme) world as "Madman." It all started 14 or 13 years ago when I was doing cassette and CD covers of bands and projects of my friend RR Bastard from Blasphemophagher. And then of course the same thing happened with Blasphemophagher. He always wrote Paolo "Madman" Girardi and everyone started calling me that. The nickname came from the fact that I was always an eccentric, a little crazy. Every weekend I was doing some new shit around. Big shit and little shit. Those were times when I was either loved or hated. I didn't care because I wanted (and still want) to die with a smile on my face. Now the craziness has increased but it is much more lucid and conscious ... mostly I "use" it to paint, not to hurt or bother people around me.
L: What is your relationship with the macabre?
P: Well I wouldn't just talk about the macabre ... in a broader sense I would say I'm one of the most romantic people I've ever met. Romance also includes "extreme" aspects of life, where life itself is mixed with death. So I often contemplate these areas of organic/inorganic contamination. I have always liked them since I was a child. Both aesthetics and meanings (if there are any) interest me. Every moment I think about the fragility of who we are, the corruption of the flesh, the rottenness, our precariousness. On the other hand, I believe in a kind of eternity of everyday gestures, such as dedicating one's life to passions and to action, to doing. And to be more direct: I have always loved cemeteries, bones, insects, worms, mysterious or gross-looking animals, darkness, monsters etc... etc...
L: You are a well-known Italian painter, your paintings are also used as metal music CD covers. Who were you before you were an artist and what made you approach painting?
P: I always drew or painted from an early age, as soon as I was out of the cradle I would draw everywhere, even on the walls before I articulated the sounds to speak. Then I was forced to go to high school although I always drew even in junior high school... then I went to the military. Later I undertook the Academy of Fine Arts but I was doing more damage than learning. I had already understood from the beginning that in Italy that school was a parking lot of daddy's boys and that the professors who teach are almost all recommended, people without quality or love. I did a lot of wonderful damage and various crap there often with the help of beers. Some less heavy shit, some a little more bad. Before my dissertation to graduate, I quit my studies, tired of the ignorant goody-goody trend there. I started painting seriously on my own in Ascoli, my town, locked away for years and years and years copying old paintings every day without ever stopping. Then I began to create new ones, supported by a basic classical technique.
Surviving by selling my works and also by other temporary odd jobs I came to 3 years ago when I "seriously" began to make a living exclusively from my painting. Now at 40, I am a happy and accomplished person, always working, always fervent and immersed in the flow of my countless commissions from all over the world. A dream what I am living.
L: Who are the masters who contributed to your painting education? What works of theirs have always fascinated you?
P: Let's say the focus of my interests is European painting from the 1400s to the late 1800s. My favorite masters are endless, it would be fair to name them all without leaving out one. To be brief I would mention: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Guercino, Bosch, Grunewald, Brueghel , El Greco, Goya, Piranesi, Velasquez, Friedrich, Turner, Gericault, David, Ingres, Constable... and endless others. Of course, I am interested in all movements rooted in European culture (nineteenth-century American painting, for example). Everything that is vision feeds me anyway, I have been affected and learned from everything I see, without bad/good or ugly/beautiful divisions, without morals or ethics.
L: How much of your life is on your canvases? What are your sources of inspiration?
P: Since I am better known, since my clients as well as people in general trust my abilities I can express myself better on canvas. This means that during my work I have been able to open my heart more to memories, perversions, hopes, visions, dreams, nightmares. So today there is much more private than before in my painting. I don't know how much but I can finally share the real Paolo Girardi with those who can and/or want to read me. I am inspired by everything, I never throw anything away. Negative and positive, comfortable and uncomfortable...I burn everything to use it as fuel and energy, qualities in painting. Everything is precious.
L: How does one of your works come about?
P: A work of mine is born out of a commission and thus out of a request. I use as a springboard for pictorial realization everything those clients have given me (impressions behind the words of their emails, their tastes, music played, their nationality, their imagery, song lyrics, etc...). Then I mix all this with what I expect and want to do for them, mix it with something random that happens to me on those days often, making it all very consonant with my life flow, my events... tying it also partly to the randomness of events of that particular moment... and then visions, obsessions. Everything contributes to a unique, high and pure product for me. Deeply human.
L: How do you feel when you look at your finished works? Is painting for you a way to immortalize fragments of your life or much of your life?
P: After I have finished a work for a while I feel a detachment-indifference toward it, because by now I am used to painting one painting after another with the speed of a machine. But in the creative stage, as soon as I finish a painting I must feel satisfaction, harmony, perfection, elevation, fusion with the world, strength, completeness. If I don't have these feelings I have to look for more, I still have to finish the work that is incomplete. Painting immortalizes my life, and it is the best way to communicate with my body, I think.
L: What issues do you deal with the most and why?
P: The themes I deal with are the most varied, from epic to decadent rotten, from fantasy to nonsense. All of them as you said earlier always have that "macabre" vein that I would broadly call extremely romantic... strong, earthy, sanguine but at the same time ethereal, ideal, eternal. As I said the themes are at first agreed upon with the client but then I always take off in other ways, my own. Of course, if the musical genre or the client's proposal does not satisfy me, does not appeal to me, I turn down the work.
In every work I always put a lot of nature (weather, animals, plants, branches, views) because as a child I grew up in nature, in silence among the mountains, and these deferred, long, deep, lonely times ... marked me deeply. However, nature is the basis of everything, always and should be for every painter, I think.
L: Light/dark contrasts, warm tones intertwined with cold ones, twisted and deformed bodies, chaos and death... what drives you to paint certain figures and use certain types of color? What is the color you use most often and why?
P: Well by now I think I'm a work-and-war machine so I don't question why certain choices anymore. I used to have more time to understand myself. Now I do, I try to do it the best I can. Certainly mine are formal choices that reflect a desire to transcend a tangible everyday reality that is incomplete, poor in values, not noble, utilitarian, ignorant. Thus I create supernatural worlds where the rules, the fate of life itself, are overturned. Parallel worlds in which I try to live, colors and contrasts where I take refuge from the extreme obviousness and boredom of reality. My deformed and twisted creatures, the aesthetics of cold/hot contrast, the reversal of nature, help me not to get bored here.
I make love to it, let's say. Like I make love to my colors, all... my favorites are Pompeii red first, then burnt shadow earth, Naples yellow, cadmium red and garanza lacquer, cobalt blue and ochre. Let's say I really love earth colors. Real, real, simple ... but intense, dusty, haunting, suffocating, as soon as they get a little warm....
L: Can you tell us about your record illustration work? What was the first album with your artwork on the cover? Is it usually bands that commission your artwork?
P: I am always contacted by groups, I have never contacted anyone. They found me in the beginning and now that I am well known in the environment I have many requests from groups and record labels. I try to avoid private individuals because for me there is more satisfaction in seeing my paintings printed on vinyls, CDs, posters, T-shirts and more ... all over the world. My first album cover was "Nuclear Empire of the Apocalypse" by Blasphemophagher, year 2008. After a year or two I covered Diocletian, then Tyrants Blood, In League with Satan, Chaos Inception, Nuclear Magick, STAV, Vastum, Kulto Mladito, Baphomet's Blood, Power Trip, Prosanctus Inferi, Cauchemar, Battle Ram, Lycus, Inquisition, Direblaze, Nocturnal Graves, Essence of Datum, Nihilo, Artificial Brain, Decaying Purity, Warpstone, Ordo Inferus, Craven Idol, Demonic Christ, Evil Eruption, Ashencult and others...
L: Of all the artwork you've curated, which ones have satisfied you the most?
P: I don't know... as I said I feel a certain detachment from the works I did previously, a feeling of serene detachment, balanced strangeness so I don't know! They are all my children, my paintings. Each with its own merits and flaws. Plus I don't like to dredge up the past as if it were a golden age, even though I am a kind of troglodyte living in the Middle Ages. Also, mentioning artwork for the most famous or most followed bands would not do justice to the other bands that have given me friendship, trust, respect, work and money.
L: What famous metal album would you have liked to have done the cover artwork for? Name two bands for which you would jump through hoops to curate their publication artwork.
P: I have no regrets or wishes. I mean: I have my favorite bands, my albums - total worship. But I think my life and my path are perfect like that. I have no desires to collaborate with this or that. I have desires to still continue to meet people who love, honor and respect me, as I have until now. Fame or musical value takes second place to human values: respect, honor, loyalty, trust. My deep "religious" commitment must be honored, otherwise goodbye.
L: How do you reconcile your still life works with the profanity reproduced in metal covers?
P: I like to paint first of all, so I already have a perpetual flow inside me that makes me paint anything, as I have done for years. All the different "genres" I deal with have in common is this dark, seventeenth-century, dreamlike, surreal, distorted, mysterious, suffocating, deadly style of mine. Sometimes acidic even. The still lifes are dark, reflective, silent -- like some of the bottomless abysses I paint in my covers.
L: What is your relationship with religion? How do you feel about the church?
P: I am a religious person: painting is my religion, work is my religion, love, passion are my religion. Maybe I am a true religious person because in general what "normal" people call "religion" is a crime syndicate. I hate the Church as a crime syndicate, I know that over the centuries she has only tortured, sentenced more people to death or suffering than any dictatorship. But I also think that thanks to her here in Italy we still have the largest and most important artistic heritage in the world. I love old churches, I love sacred objects: paintings, sculptures, architecture etc...
The Church like life, human affairs are controversial, good and evil mix, contaminate each other, nothing has only one meaning... So I am aware that to honor so many lives immolated over the centuries could be to observe, to understand, to study that heritage paid with their blood. To ignore the works of art we have just because they belong to the Church would be to repeat the mistakes derived from ignorance of the past. I am here painting because of religion: I grew up in an Italy rich in religious art. My eyes and senses have been "spoiled" from an early age to the best. I totally hate Islam, however.
L: What do you love about your work and what is most rewarding to you?
P: Of my work I love everything, primarily the relationship I have with people, the freedom and imagination, the dream, the horizons that transcend the materiality of life. I love the work, the practical part: physical but very mental. I love being loved and appreciated all over the world, I love living in people's hearts. Painting is the only thing that gives meaning to my life, although I don't know what it is and why I paint. I just know that I need it.
A: What is your relationship with dark and metal music? Can you tell us what are your favorite bands and what subgenres do you favor?
P: I don't listen to dark music, the darkest thing I listen to is 70s dark rock (from Black Sabbath to Black Widow, High Tide and Atomic Rooster, just to name a few). I only listen to 80s metal especially heavy - power. I also love country rock, thrash metal, early death metal, 70s dark rock as I mentioned, hard rock in general. Less 90s metal, almost nothing from the late 90s onwards.
I like ("old" albums): Iron Maiden, Manowar, Anthrax, Judas Priest, Manilla Road, Black Sabbath, Dio, Rainbow, Motorhead, AC/DC, Accept, Running Wild, Venom, Helloween, Cirith Ungol, Kiss, Lizzy Borden, Tyrant, Omen, Ozzy, Rose Tattoo, Molly Hatchet, Pentagram,WASP, Virgin Steele, Fifth Angel, Anvil, Atomic Rooster, High Tide, Uriah Heep, Mercyful Fate, King Diamond, Saint Vitus, The Obsessed... etc... Also: Lynyrd Skynyrd, ZZ Top, Ted Nugent, Johnny Cash, Dwight Yoakam..etc...then also Slayer, Deicide, Sinister, Immolation, Suffocation, Cannibal Corpse, Death, Dark Ange...etc...just to name a few.
L: Do you love horror cinema? What are the films that have succeeded in giving you a thrill?
P: I love horror cinema even though I haven't particularly followed newcomers for many years. Today's cinema only makes me regret better times. I generally like all horror from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. As a kid, I grew up with the 1950s classics that were then shown on TV at regular times. As a teenager I really loved Stephen King whose 13 books I read and saw all the movies taken from his works. The first real thrill gave me in '82 "The Fog," which is then from 1979 I think.
Obviously "The Exorcist" and "The Exorcist 2″ and the films of Tobe Hooper. I really loved the films of Fulci, D'Amato, the first 4 of Dario Argento, Lamberto Bava, Deodato and, of course... "The House of Laughing Windows" by Pupi Avati. Today I don't see TV anymore, it bored and disappointed me a lot. By the way, it is rare for me to watch a healthy DVD, I don't have much time for myself. But my memories of other times are always present and vivid.
L: Have music and film ever been a source of inspiration in your art?
P: Yes, of course music and film are also the basis of my inspiration. Suffice it to say that music is the constant background in my studio work days. The interest in horror cinema that I have always had has clearly "directed" me toward mystery, scares, misdeeds, murders, and massacres.
L: What are your future plans?
P: "AD MAIORA," this Latin saying exemplifies my future plans: so work, work and improvement. I owe it to myself and to those who appreciate me, respect me, love me, and support me.
L: An opinion of your own on this interview?
P: Beautiful and meticulous interview, it gave me a way to go deep, to talk, to open up, thanks to Lady of Sorrow who gave me the opportunity. In fact, I thank her from the bottom of my heart for her great helpfulness and friendliness. Rare to find people as passionate and open as she is.
L: Thank you Paul... Please leave a message for the DarkVeins community and everyone who will read this interview!
P: "I am in the ground, I am in the air, I am all, I live in the hearts of men, I am the call to greatness, not all can hear... Tall as a mountain! I'm gonna tear through the sky! Life's for the taking! Like a man is mountainside, greatness waits for those who tried, none can teach you, it's all inside... Just climb..."
L: Paul we thank you for your kindness and helpfulness!
