Paolo Gioli was born in Sarzano, Rovigo, in 1942. He trained as a painter and in the late sixties he worked in Venice, where he met Emilio Vedova and Giuseppe Santomaso, and New York, where he came into direct contact with Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art and New American Cinema. He returned to Italy and lived in Rome from 1969 to 1975, a period in which Mario Schifano, Franco Angeli and Tano Festa were active.
Gioli combines painting and drawing with silk screen printing and lithography, as well as cinema and photography, using a pinhole camera and taking the mechanical image back to its most essential historical and philosophical roots. He also used later the camera obscura. He became linked to the Cooperativa Cinema Indipendente (Independent Cinema Cooperative), around which Alfredo Leonardi, Gianfranco Baruchello and Massimo Bacigalupo operated. He presented his first films at FilmStudio, produced photos and films from video images and, from 1973, began to reinterpret the fotofinish technique creatively.
From 1976 to 1981 he lived in Milan. In 1977 he began to use Polaroids and developed techniques for transferring them onto different supports, mainly drawing paper and silk and, since 1979, he has also used Cibachrome. He returned to Rovigo in 1984. Since 1989 he has lived in Lendinara, Rovigo, and continues to be involved in photography and cinema. Together with his painting, silk screens, lithography and photographs, he has produced over thirty experimental films from the early seventies to the present day.
He has had solo and group exhibitions in countless private and public galleries and in museums in Italy, Europe and the United States.