Sergio Piccoli

Sergio Piccoli was born in Verona in 1946. When he was sixteen years old, he started to take an interest in painting through which he sought to express his emotions. His first works date from the 1970s, when he undertook various studies and experiments by observing the output of other artists. As Walter Guadagnini wrote: One can easily imagine Piccoli in this period in his studio trying out colors, forms, and images, or else visiting museums housing the outstanding works of modern art, the icons of the avant-garde that had already earned its place in history. In this period Piccoli painted still lifes such as Composizione con frutta (Composition with Fruit, 1970), displaying the influence of Giorgio Morandi, in which the objects were rendered succinctly, their forms represented only with color, becoming, in Composizione (Composition, 1974), patches of color accompanied by graffiti, created by scratching through the surface of the paint. In Composizione con frutta, the outlines of the objects are only produced by the underlying color of the painting: Piccoli, in fact, worked on an orange ground that served not only to obtain special tonal effects but also to define the borders of each object represented. In this work, the ground color was deliberately covered during the first stage of its execution, but, subsequently, as in Composizione, the graphic signs scratched through the paint surface allowed the underlying color to be visible in some places. The graphic element found in Piccoli’s works was a constant of his artistic output in this period and attests to how complex his investigation of color effects had become. When observing works such as La vela (The Sail) of 1978 or Giallo importante (Important Yellow) of 2003, created twenty-five years apart, one notes that these graphic devices used by the artist are evidence of the amount of experimentation he had to carry out in order to obtain color effects that were always different. It is possible that the artist’s use of signs derived from the fact that he attended graphic design courses in Verona for three years, from 1973/74 onwards; according to Piccoli, these courses helped him, in particular, to learn how to mix the colors. During this period of study, he started to take an interest in various artists and movements: the work of Paul Cézanne, as may be seen in his landscapes; Cubism, especially in his preparatory studies for a mural in the entrance-hall of the Porta Nuova station in Verona; the bright colors of the Fauves, as in Al mare, meditazione (At the Sea, Meditation, 1974); and the painting of Mario Sironi and the theme of work, creating compositions with a preponderance of grays, browns, and dull blues evoking the world of industry and machines, examples of which are Giorno di lavoro (Working Day, 1975) and Uomo bullone (Bolt Man, 1978). Piccoli also drew inspiration from the work of Paul Klee for his lyrical landscapes, such as Colline veronesi (Veronese Hills, 1978), characterized by delicate colors and simple graphic elements creating a dream-like atmosphere. In 1976 he was awarded the Burano Prize, as his friend the poet and art critic Alessandro Mozzambani recalls: Albeit with the restraint of a style that was still figurative, as early as 1976 the brightness of his colors received the recognition of the Burano Prize, which—whether or not it is in decline— represents, for an inhabitant of the Veneto, the history of the renovating modernity of Gino Rossi, Pio Semenghini, and all the other poets of color who have been inspired by the tradition of the Veneto. In the same year Piccoli executed Verona in movimento (Verona in Movement), a mural for the entrance-hall of the Porta Nuova station in Verona; as has already been mentioned, the preparatory studies, dating from 1975, display the influence of Cubism—some recall the work of Fernand Léger, others Picasso’s Guernica. In 1978 he had a solo exhibition in Lausanne at the Galerie Stilfar, where he met Willy Mechnick and Peter Maag, who offered him hospitality the following year in St. Moritz when he had an exhibition there. In this period, which was still one of study and experimentation, the artist took a close interest in the work of Wassily Kandinsky, whose book Concerning the Spiritual in Art he read carefully and, in line with its thesis, he stated that he “loved painting coming from the spirit.” The result was a series of works in which prevailed instinct and “spontaneity”—as Angelo Barone wrote: At first appeared the plane of the surface and, separate from this, the multitude that those who had preceded him had constructed on it. S.P. tackled this plane with the voracity of the pioneer, colonized the void of the surface with instinctive routes, with the ancestral spontaneity of the human hand, with a continuous gesture—the upward rubbing of the pastel—that oozes admiration for the Armenian-born American painter Arshile Gorky. At the beginning of the 1980s, Piccoli’s first period of experimentation and study concluded, only to be followed by new artistic results. In 1981 he exhibited his Mutazioni continue (Continuous Mutations) at the Galerie de Roode Boom in The Hague, followed by the series of the Armonie (Harmonies), works in which his nature as a colorist was increasingly evident. As Walter Guadagnini wrote, in these paintings composed of streaks of color, “he combined the emotional aspect with the rational one,” while “formal control that pays—perhaps for the last time—its debt to a constructive concept of painting” was still present. During the exhibition in The Hague he met various Dutch artists, including André van Lier and Jules Bekker; he remained in contact with the latter, who offered him hospitality when he stayed in the Netherlands in 1983 and 1984. The exchange of views with these artists was very important for Piccoli, to the extent that he made significant changes to his output: toward the middle of the 1980s, he abandoned the Armonie in order to enlarge the fields of color, giving rise to the Nuvole (Clouds), works in which, compared to the previous series, there was a greater instinctive element. In 1985 Piccoli had a solo exhibition at the Galleria Ferrari in Verona, during which he met the architect Giovanni Pompole, who arranged for him to use a studio in Piazza Bra, in the same city, where he created his first large paintings. This friendship with Pompole is recalled in a poem by Mozzambani dedicated to them both, entitled “A Giovanni Pompole e a… Sergio Piccoli.” While Piccoli’s encounter with van Lier and Bekker was important for certain developments in his painting, this was even more so with regard to his visit to New York in 1989. Here he was invited by the America-Italy Society, which provided him with a studio on Broadway that was “large, bright, high, and full of green plants,” as the artist wrote in his travel diary. In New York, where he stayed for three or four months, he had exhibitions at the Axxle Gallery and the premises of the America-Italy Society. In this period he worked a great deal, continuing his investigation of color, while he also visited the city’s museums to see the works of such artists as Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko; this gave him a strong emotional charge that led to new developments in his art. Thus Piccoli reworked the style of American painting with a sensibility to color that could be traced back to the tradition of Venetian painting, to which he was closely attached and which he did forget even during his stay in New York, as he noted in his diary: “In the studio do something delicate like my old Veronese school.” In 1991 the art critic Maria Teresa Badalucco invited him to hold an exhibition at the Arbut Gallery in Moscow; on this occasion he gave a lecture on color, got in touch with the intellectual milieu of the Russian capital, and made contact with the architect Victor Litvinov. After Piccoli’s experience in Moscow and an exhibition in 1993 at the Galleria dell’Annunciata in Milan, where he met Angelo Barone, a sculptor and professor of drawing of the Accademia di Belle Arti in Ravenna, color began to expand on the surface of the canvas, which almost became a monochrome, but without ever being such in the absolute sense. This is what Valerio Dehò wrote in his catalogue essay for an exhibition at the Galleria L’Ariete in Bologna in 2001: What Piccoli has managed to do is to free the space from other factors that may cause interference, allowing color to become the only protagonist of the work. In order to carry out this process without slipping into monochrome, something that had already been done very frequently in the second half of the twentieth century, the artist has surrounded the visual core with discordant colors, thus increasing the centrality of the dominant color. This is the return of the “power of the center” about which [Rudolf] Arnheim has written, but it has returned as a brightly-lit void or apparition. Also when Piccoli creates juxtapositions of a variety of colors, reducing the centrality I have just mentioned, there is, in any case, a dominant color supporting the picture’s structure. This marked an important turning-point in Piccoli’s painting, when he adopted a new approach to his work that still characterizes it today. The central part of the pictures seems to lose importance, but this is only apparent, because it is the colors themselves that surround it and heighten its centrality. Known and appreciated in the artistic milieu of Verona, Piccoli was contacted in 1977 by the architect Rinaldo Olivieri, who asked him to decorate the new Teatro Camploy in the city, where he painted a series of frescoes entitled Il cielo di Tespi (The Sky Of Thespis). The artist was thus able to show his capacity to create works suitable for large spaces in a style that was now distant from that of his murals in Verona’s Porta Nuova station. In 2002, he executed Infinito (Infinity), a fresco commissioned by the entrepreneur Giovanni Martinelli for a theater in Sandrà (near Verona) dedicated to his son Diego Martinelli, the victim of a road accident; at the same time he frescoed a wall in the corridor of the offices of Martinelli’s clothing firm and subsequently, in 2006, painted a fresco on a wall of the premises of the Tipografia Aurora in Bussolengo, also near Verona. In 2003 the Museo d’Arte delle Generazioni Italiane del ’900, founded by Giulio Bargellini in Pieve di Cento, near Bologna, acquired two paintings by Piccoli for its collection and his work was published in the book Storia dell’arte italiana del ‘900 per generazioni. Generazione anni quaranta by Giorgio Di Genova. In 2004 the Fondazione Cariverona commissioned two works from the artist in order to expand its collection; in the catalogue of the collection, an essay by Camilla Bertoni introduces the works published. His work is on display at the Galleria Open Art in Prato, with which he first made contact in 2005. Piccoli produces unique color effects, obtained by a continuous superimposition of tones, which in some works is immediately evident, while in others is only perceptible after long and careful observation. The artist is attracted by the “color movement,” which from the Armonie onward has been continuously developing; while in the Armonie it was characterized by a linear course, following a rhythm that was mainly horizontal, subsequently it has been articulated in depth. Through color he seeks to convey his feelings of experience and his emotions with regard to the natural world. Indeed, in some of his paintings it is possible to sense the atmosphere characterizing the landscape of the Veneto plain, the indefinite line between the earth and the sky that, on sunny days, shines with a delicate light.

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