Valerio Picariello
The
Art of Valerio Picariello Vital Everyday Contemporaneity Barely sketched urban architectures, drawn by a tense,
thick and highly tactile writing - often grim
– are the background of streets crossed by restless characters – extremely
expressive – who plough the chromatic waves, dissolve and get mixed up in an
harmoniously balanced environment, thus increasing a powerful idea of movement. This is a
visible movement, prompted by skilfully laid on and disordered sketches of colour, which
powerfully convey the vitality, the anxiety, the mental and physical disorder and the need
for space, air, life and survival in the city. We do not feel, however, any kind of distress in
Picariello’s crowd: it is everyday life - shopping, a stroll with the dog, a rush to
the office, a chat during a chance meeting, advances,
business, a break at the bar – all perceived not through a visual reading of images,
but through the eyes of the mind – in a process of multiple sensations which are
elaborated by looking at the shapes, the signs, the spaces and the shadows of these
paintings. In these metropolitan images, Valerio Picariello enhances
the abstraction of his painting with a frantic chromatic amalgam and with never-defined
characters and faces – especially the masculine ones. He is a master of the shadows,
of floating souls dematerialized from every kind of physicalness. Physicalness, though, is always present when the subject
of his composition are women: they are never sketched, but conveyed with fluid
brush-strokes and solid materiality – made up of
a mellow colouring and a gentle prominence of shapes. The necessity of this
greater definition of female characters comes from the need to convey a more prominent
carnality. Undressed or scantily dressed, generous bodies and soft gluteus, quiet and
relaxed in their gestural expressiveness, we do
not perceive these women as detached and unreachable, but as discretely approachable and
joyfully sensual. Close to them, we do often perceive a male presence: in a shadow
reflected by a mirror, or a shaded shoulder, or barely perceptible in the background
– a presence emblematic of an ill-concealed autobiographic voyeurism. More delicate and imaginative are the female nudes, with
their subtle and intriguing charm., painted in watercolour or tempera. Picariello has
always been a very good watercolour and tempera painter, and likes to alternate delicate
sepia monochromes to shining compositions with a shaded and delicate polychromy. In the oil paintings – besides the images of city
life and the female nudes we have mentioned above – there are interesting and almost
expressionist representations of interiors, crowded, chaotic and convulsive. Such
representations show vibrant chromatic clashes and are dominated by a dizziness of
different shades of red, orange and violet: theatre dressing rooms with female dancers,
bars with customers and taverns with card-players and drinkers. A heavy tone of colour
alters the characters’ faces, soaking them, almost dissolving them and stressing
their expressive strength – though with a simplifying of shapes. In these paintings,
barely sketched characters and unpainted portions of the base support suggest a quick and
intuitive rendering, to the advantage of a balanced pictorial framework where the
constituent lines arise from the intersection of different areas of colour. Gian
Carlo Sbardella [Trad. Arianna Cantoni]
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Valerio Picariello Was born in His artistic endeavor began as water-colourist in the
early 1970, his work was shown in various galleries, in Bologna, Brescia, Milan and had
exposed his work of art collectively with other Italian and foreign artists ( in 1986 in
Bologna for Dimensione Art with Gattuso, Cantatore, Gentilini, Sassu, Chagall, De Chirico,
Miro. Again In Bologna in 1986 for Artespaziodieci with Ungania, Bignani, Engel,
Speroni. In 1987 for Dimensione Art
showed his work with other artists of such magnitude as Salvador
Dali and Nkde Amedokpo), always with a positive response emanating from the “freshness
of his designs” and from the transparent bright images of the chromatic gamut of his
art work. His latest art showing was in 1998 for the gallery of
Castiglione Art located in From the beginning of 2006 Valerio Picariello begins a
re-interpretation of the Passion of Christ; he is inspired from past masters for his
scenic depiction, but transforming those images in vibrant colors animated with desolate
ugliness, or as in Christ and the Virgin Mary, filled with sorrow and suffering,
cognoscent of the knowledge that they should
resign themselves to the fate of the Devine
design. The protagonists of his poetic paintings are the lack of realistic chromatism and
the obsessive perception, of the drama that has yet to unfold In these works of art, the multitude of human figures are
simply depicted in a manner comprising deformity in both facial expression and contorted
bodies, while retaining the well composed suffering images of the Nazarene and the visible
painful affliction of Mary. Additionaly, his images explode in a detailed expression of
human bodies, visibly agitated in a convulsive state of sorrowful bitter mysticism,
expressed in an immediate impact of images, executed with suffering, but never in a
pitiful manner. Gian
Carlo Sbardella
www.arsbononia.it |
