Paolo Mussat Sartor enters the work of artists, penetrating into the temporal and spatial interstices of the work produced, documenting it in its passages. The result is always an image that is also attentive to convey the ethic of how to make art, a new way of putting artists in front of the creation.

1978, Achille Bonito Oliva

Paolo Mussat Sartor trained as a photographer in a very unusual situation: a ‘place’ that tended to characterise the very quality of his vision. This place was Gian Enzo Sperone’s art gallery in Turin, which he went to just about every day from 1968 to 1975. In Turin and in Italy in those days, Galleria Sperone was an authentic powerhouse of ideas where an extraordinary group of artists used to meet and discuss their work. Among the artists with whom he worked, Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Mario and Marisa Merz, Emilio Prini, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Giorgio Griffa, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Salvo and Gilberto Zorio. No assessment of Paolo Mussat Sartor’s work can ignore the intellectual and human relations he entertained, and still entertains, with some of them.
At the age of just twenty, the young photographer was involved in recording the unique creative season of Arte Povera, and to photograph performances, precarious installations and works made with ephemeral materials.
Paolo Mussat Sartor, as well as those artists who revolved around Galleria Sperone, photographs other legendary figures in the world of Italian art in the second half of the twentieth century. These include Gino De Dominicis, Mario Schifano, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Enzo Cucchi, Luigi Ontani, Emilio Vedova, and others. During the 1970s he also met and photographed a substantial number of international artists including Joseph Beuys, Daniel Buren, Arman, Joseph Kosuth, Richard Long, Christo, Tony Cragg, Lawrence Weiner, and Douglas Huebler.

Andrea Bellini