Paolo Colombo is an Italian artist and poet. Born in 1949 in Turin, Italy, he lives and works in Athens, Greece. He was a curator between 1986 and 2017 in Philadelphia, in Geneva, in Istanbul, in Torino and in Athens. His works of visual poetry are exhibited widely.
Paolo Colombo, you are Italian by birth, studied in Switzerland, lived in the United States, worked in many countries. Why is Athens your city of choice?
It is the city where I have lived the most in my life, all together about 22 years, mostly because of encounters. Greece seemed like a magic place when I first came aged 19. After I had finished 8 years of boarding school on a Swiss mountain, my first vacation was in Crete. I had an awakening, a love for the land, for the country, for the light, for everything that Crete stood for. I loved the life of Greece at the time, which was not an easy time. It was the summer of ‘68 and there was a military junta led by the colonels. Many of my friends thought that it was wrong to go to a country where there was a junta, but I saw things in a possibly more apologetic way. I was in Crete, living with people whose main concern was survival, and who definitely did not like the colonels. Crete is historically a left-wing part of Greece, and they asked me to bring records of Theodorakis, whose music was forbidden in Greece and which I loved deeply.
Did you speak Greek?
I knew a little Greek, not large amounts, but people were extremely hospitable, and therefore incredibly friendly to whoever was trying to speak their language.
Paolo Colombo, was it in Greece that you realised that you were going to be an artist?
I knew from the age of 12. I became aware in the first two weeks of boarding school that I wanted to paint. I didn’t really put it as clearly as “I want to be an artist”, but our drawing teacher – who just passed away and with whom I was in contact throughout the years – had asked us to bring to class a box of Caran d’Ache gouache, two paint brushes, pencils. In the third lesson of the first semester he took out a book and asked us to take a dictation. He read us a paragraph from Thomas Mann’s novella in which Tonio Kröger, on a beach in the North Sea, in the distance sees the two loves of his life, Hans Hansen and Ingeborg Holm. Hans and Inge Holm came together to kiss. Then he said, “Please illustrate it.” I decided then and there that that was what I wanted to do forever. I had no idea of Greece until I was 18. I had read the Iliad and the Odyssey because they are part of the Italian curriculum, and one of the Italian poets was actually a Greek poet who wrote in Italian, Ugo Foscolo.
