In a dedication of a book containing his works, Pericle Fazzini, having expressed his opinion about Guido Venieri with words of esteem and praise, went on to define his style of painting as “always open to individual conclusion.”
We don’t believe a more true judgement could be expressed on Guido Venieri’s personality whose painting is neither casual or artificial nor academic, shallow or dispersive – it distinguishes itself for its capacity of concluding an artistic speech, transforming an art project into true art forms.
For this reason, Guido Venieri deserves wide recognition besides adequate evaluation in the field of contemporary painting and from art lovers and critics. The aim of this exhibition is to create public awareness of the works of an authentic artist who has been undiscovered for more than thirty years. This is because Guido Venieri, as a shy man and true artist had no desire for fame but simply a love for art, being a man who has never requested consideration from others.
Guido Venieri had a consuming passion for art. This led him to continuously practice drawing and painting daily for over six years before he ever started work on his first canvas. Only when he felt that the shapes and forms he was creating were worthy of keeping did he produce his first real work of art. An event which developed – naturally – along already covered fundamental itineraries but which was marked by interesting and original experiences, interwoven by acute readings and marked by an unambiguous expressive autonomy referred to his painting ideas and perceptions. Being immersed in that direction of culture intelligently brought towards a subtle meditation on the possibility of opening the most valid elements of the authentic tradition to a perspective of the most modern European language Guido Venieri convincingly and without hesitation revisits repertoires of figurative traditions. This he does through an individual feeling and a strong pictorial language, using inspiration from previous expressive art forms and whilst being distanced and not too subordinated. Therefore a kind of painting with a strong and intense depth which is due to a strong underlying emotional charge. He deals with themes such as the crucifixion, nativity or maternity combining literary, romantic and academic aspects.
The themes which G.V. dealt with avoid the danger of being interpreted as a pathetic re-elaboration – even if formally capturing – of subjects traditionally near our culture and sensibility and on the contrary constituting the elements of his inner world. They are the plots around which his research of man’s destiny develop. They are the journey and the starting point of his unexhausted explorations about life and death, about joy and sorrow, love and hate about serenity and anguish about good and evil, in conclusion about everything concerning man.
Therefore is seen from this visual perspective, his great canvasses of the Crucifixion and Nativity, both display a crowd of grieving faces and a rhythmical scanning of life and death , not representing the infinity iconographic evocation which is more or less infinitive, but reveal themselves as the means chosen by the artist to give a powerful and dramatic mosaic of the human condition.
Drawing, form and colour are the elements of solid expressive framework which makes his subjective world with prompt efficiency and materialize his spiritual expression.
It is essentially an expressionist framework, both because of his inner torment which intensively animates the canvas and filling the space like a swelling river and because of his desire to accent forms and colours under which emotions pulse which otherwise could not be expressed. (In this way allowing him to release his pulsating emotions to canvas)
Flowing and vigorous forms, which are sometimes lawless and evasive or twisted or contorted or deformed , but always extraordinarily lively, conceived with poor but suggestive simplification, suggested and proposed by sober drawing and capable of structuring them with rare essentiality.
Faces, bodies, horses, hands, limbs even if they are purified from any naturalistic superabundance even obliged in a rapid and synthetic expression, are however extremely and realistically both true and lively, they are expressed with both strength and suggestion and they express the turmoil in his soul. Colour sometimes chosen in its simple essence, and sometimes warped in harmonic synthesis, is exalted in a compositive order skillfully organized in sequences, spread entirely with organic coherence: both entities don’t limit themselves to support the pictorial idea but constitute its inner essence.
Guido Venieri was born, lives and works in Grottammare.
Luigi Sammartino 1982.
