A painting by Guccione gives a sense of love, of poetry:
the eye rests on it and lingers there as on something rare,
Of recreating, still making us feel valid, authentic,
the beauty-truth equation
Leonardo Sciascia, 1985
A little over fifty years after the last Ferrara exhibition dedicated to Piero Guccione, organized in 1971 by Franco Farina at the Visual Activities Center at Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara returns to pay homage to this great 20th-century master who, as Vittorio Sgarbi has written, “after the death of Fontana, Gnoli and Burri represented the supreme synthesis of figurative and abstract painting” in Italy.
The exhibition, organized by the Ferrara Arte Foundation and the Art Museum Service of the Municipality of Ferrara in collaboration with Il Cigno Arte and the Piero Guccione Archive, chronologically traces the artist’s entire production, presenting the public with more than seventy works including paintings and pastels divided into two chapters: the years in Rome (1957-1972) and the return to Sicily (1970-2014).
The exhibition, set up at the Pavilion of Contemporary Art, focuses on the painter’s favorite themes: from the relationship between the urban landscape and nature, to poetic and delicate variations on the theme of the sea and the sky, through tributes to the great masters of the past.
Piero Guccione was born May 5, 1935, in Scicli in the province of Ragusa. After graduating from the Art Institute of Catania, in 1954 he moved to Rome, where he frequented the neorealist painters, looking both at Renzo Vespignani, with whom he shared militancy in the group Il Pro e il Contro – together with Attardi, Calabria, Guerreschi, Gianquinto, Farulli, Ferroni, the critics Micacchi, Del Guercio, and Morosini – and at Renato Guttuso, whose assistant he was at the Academy, but whose expressionist inclinations he did not share. In the ferment of the Roman environment, his artistic and formal research takes off and urban landscapes are born, such as the Balconies, i Gardens e Interior-Exteriors: works characterized by an innovative slant and drawn from a common, intimate everyday life in which echo references to Cézanne, Bonnard, and Morandi, to name but a few. In the late 1960s, with the cycle of the Waiting
, the space becomes more metaphysical and Hopperian, and starting in the following decade, with his definitive return to Sicily, he began to paint the sea, trying to capture its infinite vibrations and variations. In these works he takes his research to the limits of abstraction while remaining, however, well anchored in reality. “I am attracted by its absolute immobility, which is, however, constantly in motion,” the artist, who daily admired that Mediterranean landscape up to the horizon line, was fond of repeating.
At the same time, he also worked on cycles dedicated to the carob tree and the Iblei mountains, made with the pastel technique while, with the series of d’après, confronts some famous masterpieces by, among others, Masaccio, Signorelli, Michelangelo, Giorgione, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Chardin, Friedrich, Bacon. A personal tribute to the great champions of painting of all time, a list in which, with good reason, can also be included Piero Guccione, who passed away on October 6, 2018, in his beloved home-studio in Quartarella in the Modican countryside.
This exhibition is an unmissable opportunity to closely contemplate the delicacy, quiet lyricism, intensity and beauty of the Sicilian artist’s paintings. In Guccione’s words, “The current times certainly do not induce beauty. And this also applies to art. Today people favor ugliness, arrogance, horror even. I, on the other hand, try to paint beauty: and I care nothing about being modern or not. Being judged not in line with modernity is completely indifferent to me.”
_________
From an idea of
Vittorio Sgarbi and Lorenzo Zichichi
Edited by.
Vasily Gusella
Organizers
Ferrara Art Foundation and Art Museum Service of the Municipality of Ferrara, in collaboration with Archivio Piero Guccione and Il Cigno Arte, with the patronage of the Emilia-Romagna Region