The work on display at Spoleto incontra Venezia, 2014

By Elena Gollini – art curator and journalist, Spoleto Arte

Color, motion and research are the connotative words behind the stylistic technique that distinguishes Bacco Artolini.

The exercise of drawing is crucial in his artistic process and brings him to obtain full mastery of the figurative, dynamic and determinate expression, that flows into the narrative solutions of surreal and fantastic nature. His art is energetic, polychrome, punchy and stinging, carrier of corporal metamorphosis and spiritual mergers.

The transformations on the canvas do not deny the story – as would the more canonical surrealist Francis Bacon have done – but are exploiting the distortion, mutation, fragmentation, acting as artistic means, that in a link of association on different levels (myth, poetry, literature, sign, symbolism, metaphor, allegory) generate the fantastic appearances – hybrids between man and animal.

 

 

“Men are not animals erect, but immortal gods. The Creator has given us souls equal to all the world, and yet satiable not even with a world”
Sir Francis Bacon

 

The Renaissance words of the famous English philosopher describe an immense soul, which in the symbolic transposition corresponds to the creative spirit of Artolini. His brilliant transfigured creatures are beings that merge into a kind of “animist deity” who inhabits his “aesthetic mythology” and gives him the – spiritually obtained – energy to create, enabling him to develop his own unique reminiscent expression.

The fast and mellow brushwork identifies a figurative painting where expressionistic transformation and conceptual cancellation converge. The figure is the undisputed protagonist, regaining its primary importance, the nerve and focal centre through the mysterious alchemy and featured bodily commingling, which penetrate and intertwine in the creation of bodies that are monstrous, but equally magnificent, with an impeccable execution of the figurative that involves and moves the viewer.

In a phase of the history of contemporary art in which resoundsthe echo of ancient formulas and techniques being reviewed, revised and recycled, Artolini imposes his own imaginative and ethical renovating language, in which the vision moves between fable and reality, both catalysts of an “existentialist” principle. Surrealism, Symbolism, Magic Realism, Neo-Romanticism come together imprinted in the paintings, highlighting the author’s desire to create a new model with an always different and special morphological dimension. A core of experimental painting to communicate with others and visually express his metaphorical point of view between dream and reality, fiction and truth, appearance and substance.

 

Text translated from Italian by Annette Tingstrup.