Critics / Press

Hidden Canvases

To caress a thought, to wander within the clouds of fantasy, to daydream and find oneself making a toast, on the edge of a pathway that has already been traced by someone else (almost as a photocopied ritual of a reiteration of a life, handed down from generation to generation) in the same elliptical itinerary, where it is possible to ride the whirlwind of the most unbridled fantasy that only absolute love, with its infinite emotions, can offer to a select few, to be transmitted with the ingenuity of a child or with the arrogance of an adult in a story that, from its first few lines, ignites curiosity and leads the reader to continue with joyful emotion that leads to expand the boundaries of the imagination to enter an unreal reality in which anything is possible, is the equivalent of riding the carousel horse of our childhood from which we would never have gotten off.

Spaces, scenarios and situations, at times paradoxical, are multiplied in the poetic propensity of Chinnici, transforming the path of his life experience into a magical labyrinth, in which it is difficult to get lost, because Diego Celi has the rare ability to virtually take the reader by hand and to carry them, in his own way of reliving multiple sensations of two lives… in a path that is sometimes parallel and at other times in total contrast, in which Art prevails and contributes to ironing out any kind of obstacle.

A swirl of bright colours that often contributes to mend small and large family disputes that, as sparks, occur between father and son, triggering small generational cataclysms fuelled by problems that sometimes go unresolved and that remain eternally suspended in a confused alternation of feelings, of questions without adequate and convincing answers, and of long silences.

A ritual and genetic game have sown a plethora of variants in an emblematic path of family and artistic misunderstandings, in which Art and the great passion for it, end up filling every specious divergence thanks to the power of love.

Metric, rhythm, colour and harmony all merge to transmit emotions; at the same time simple and complex, that Lorenzo proposes in "dissimilarity" from what was suggested by Wilbur Smith: "Write for yourself, not for a perceived audience", with the joyful intent of communicating, possibly with the whole world, only for the pleasure of doing so and to spread, like a great conductor, a pinch of joy and sadness, mixed wisely with life on the sublime notes of: Nocturne in E flat major by Chopin, able to calmly support the flight of a kite that turns out to be a "prisoner" of the thread that holds it and that, by accepting this condition, manages to discover that the meaning of happiness, sometimes, can be perceived thanks to one’s willingness to soar up in the sky guided by those who have already wisely flown before us.

José Van Roy Dalí

Fisherman: the sculptural plasticism of Lorenzo Chinnici

Genre scenes are those imprinted in the works of the Fisherman series by Lorenzo Chinnici, a Sicilian artist initiated into art by Renato Guttuso. The artist's works narrate glimpses of his beloved Sicily, Chinnici through the chromatic material synthesizes a narration from which emerges the "need" of art as the voice of one's soul.

Fisherman, a series dedicated to the activity of fishermen, where the artist gives attention to the naturilastic datum of Carraccesca matrix, depicting the work of fishing driven by the intent to give life to a series of works that, not only show those landscape views that celebrate his land, but also focusing on attention to the human figure. Flowing into the study of the human body through that sculptural plasticism enhanced by the study of light, in fact in some works of the series the artist succeeds in the masterful rendering of light that accentuates the musculature.

And so the light embodies a double value: coming from the other, it becomes a divine light, reinforcing the importance of work in daily life. Chinnici seems to look at Michelangioleschi's sketches and then readjust the study of bodies to his personal vision, following his own matrix of thought that configures the human being in a naturalistic context, highlighting his daily efforts.

Technically, the compositions of the series have a pyramidal structure whose apex is often the human figure or the boat to be towed to shore, further emphasizing the interest in figurative study.

Genre scenes that the artist animates according to his sensitivity resulting in the meticulous study of landscape details where the human being coexists with the narration of the natural landscape, recalling the evocative views of the sixteenth-century artist Giorgio da Castelfranco known as Giorgione. The dynamism typical of Renato Guttuso's neorealist works also emerges.

The ability to synthesize Renaissance art in a contemporary key is extraordinary, where the chromatic backgrounds are animated by the artist's sensitivity, the result of an attentive pictorial investigation that Lorenzo Chinnici has conducted all his life and which permeates the intrinsic matrix of his thought on the history of humanity that hovers in its representations.

Elisabetta La Rosa

Thought on Lorenzo Chinnici

Lorenzo Chinnici dreams of Sicily. He does not paint but dreams of shapes, landscapes, people, which take shape through agglutinations of color, through rhapsodies of tones. Colors and tones that are the true design of Chinnici. He dreams and creates a Sicily that does not exist, perhaps there never was, perhaps there never will be. He dreams and loves. He therefore paints something that he does not see, or if he sees it it is something that does not exist in the eyes of others except in the moment in which he himself presents it to the world: this is why his painting is only apparently "realist". Dream, memory, invention: this is Chinnici. For many he is a distant follower of Guttuso, of Giambecchina or of the closest Leotti; It is not so. Because his is a figurativism of dreamlike intent, his approach to reality is only moderately formal. The technique is perhaps the one, neo-cubist or neo-realist of a Guttuso or a Leotti, but not even this approach is too pushed towards realism. Because the landscapes, the men and women of Chinnici are as if transfigured into a heroic, mythical, titanic dimension, which is precisely the process of sublimation typical of a lover's dream. His "Sicilians" are bigger, more beautiful, more real than the natural size, the natural beauty (or ugliness), the natural reality that they really have. Their gestures, daily or perhaps overtaken by history, present themselves to us as eternal or foundational of history. His position within the Italian panorama of the history of art is then original, secluded; his is not social painting, he does not judge or criticize, his is not folklore painting: he dreams and paints. Chinnici is Chinnici, his voice says something that only he can say. But perhaps precisely in this detail there is the greatest affirmation of sense of him, since in the painting of the dream he projects the happiness of the world as it should be, the colors of Sicily as they should be, Sicily as it should be. Colorful, lively, human, joyful, happy. In this sense, like all artists, Chinnici also does Politics, indicating a way to the viewer. He indicates a Sicily (and in essence we can say the World) to those who do not see this Sicily, or do not know how to see it.

Andrea Italiano

Lorenzo Chinnici 360'

LORENZO CHINNICI

The beauty and dignity in the realist story of the daily way. Figures and images of sea and land. In reviewing the vast pictorial production of Lorenzo Chinnici, the viewer only has to lend absolute concentration to see, observe and reflect on the multiple variety of figures and objects as well as Mediterranean landscapes enlivened by an unmistakable artistic style. Obviously, the viewer, dwelling in front of each image, must try to establish the right approach as much as possible, to better manage its impact with the chromatic fabric and its message. The path is long and poly-thematic. There are several sections that ours proposes in its lasting artistic activity carried out with talent, rigor of commitment and passion. The scanning of the sections provides it to the user in a certain way by the author himself in one of his interviews: "My works are born from the sea and its people and from the landscapes of an opulent and sunny Mediterranean countryside." Therefore, ours offers the user the much loved marine world populated by fish to which he is able to paint them so realistically that they seem to dart here and there, chase and be chased. They are of various sizes, of different shapes, of different colors ready to shoot for any reason, crouching behind a stone, behind a rock, among a tuft of sea herbs, in a crack, a cave or in the sand; sometimes they camouflage themselves. Everywhere I am in motion. The canvas, with which the author represents the fish, looks like a real living aquarium! Then, the user meets the fishermen who Lorenzo Chinnici proposes tense in their effort to throw their nets into the sea or pull them onto the boat full of fish caught during the night in a calm or rough sea. How much effort often employed in empty! What a disappointment! How much despair felt even in the family which sees the income diminish to buy a loaf of bread! Furthermore, the user cannot fail to miss the exclusive technique with which the author traces the lines and curves and also smears the colors, their own colors, which represent the physicality of the fishermen in the act of their particular movement that makes them assume precise and due positions of the raised, twisted, bent body, while the face is now stretched out, now it is pulled with the eyes that seem to come out of their sockets. Furthermore, the author highlights both the calves and the ribs of the upper and lower limbs that are really muscular and the hands that claw the nets in the act of throwing them into the sea or pulling them on the beach or in a boat, when this is without a winch. . The user cannot fail to be struck, too, by the bloody slaughter of the tuna depicted, while the fishermen, commanded by the rais, harpoon the meat of the tuna from which the blood splatters that stains both the sea water and the entire circle around. It is a scene made so throbbing that the viewer seems to witness it and really live it realistically. There is no shortage of fishermen who sell their fish in Vaccarella, both who rest in the dark after the exhausting work and who pull or push, with difficulty, the friendly boat into the sea. In fact, Lorenzo Chinnici cannot fail to retain a particular privilege to the boat that he depicts moored on the coast both of the Tono, to the east, and in the small bay of the aforementioned district of Vaccarella, to the west, in Milazzo. These are boats resting on the sand that seem to be tired or ready to be loaded or unloaded by their faithful rowers. They are variously colored boats, differently positioned in the silence of a particular coastal environment. They are boats that the user imagines seeing them grappling with both calm and stormy waves in danger, even, of sinking with the precious cargo of the fishermen. Then, from the sea we pass to the land or the countryside with its main protagonists, that is the farmers. These are depicted both in the olive harvest and in other strenuous work activities that underline an ancestral bond with the beloved earth, mother of life and death, source of joy and pain. They are peasants proposed to the user in the act of fatigue, rest and conversations with their thoughts, their frustrations, their satisfactions of various sizes. They are people always in work clothes. Country women are also depicted in their multiple activities such as the olive harvest together with men, the processing of canned tomatoes, not only because they are driven by a sense of duty but also forced by the need that make them always deserving of greater esteem. and respect all over the world. Some wash clothes, for example, on the shores of Lake Como. They are modest women in dress and behavior. They are always available for the good of the family in joy and pain. However, all operate with absolute dignity. Among these groups of commoners, the viewer cannot fail to miss the painting that depicts the weakest class on the social scale, represented by the propertyless or the least. Three mothers with babies in their arms waiting to be breastfed; a boy with an uncertain future; three elderly people, in different postures, immersed in who knows their past. These are depicted in a group where each, with a downcast gaze, is absorbed in his own thoughts, without in the slightest turning towards those next to him. Everyone is alone with himself, absorbed in his own bitter destiny. Everyone feels defeated by his own stepmother fate, overwhelmed by a deep sense of shame, as he considers himself excluded from the human consortium. To say that he feels in a cage is an understatement! Especially when he lacks the closeness of his fellow man. Pietas is absent! The viewer, recovering from this disturbing representation, turns his gaze elsewhere and plunges into a climate of different cuts. Lorenzo Chinnici reveals his religious sentiment to the observer by depicting the Nativity of the Child Jesus in the Bethlehem grotto. The user, in the various representations, cannot fail to be struck by the different positions and attitudes of the Madonna and St. Joseph towards the Child Jesus. They are not static figures but presented in affectionate gestures of parental love. Moving is, for example, a picture in which the Child Jesus holds out his hands to St. Joseph who shows that he wants to take him into his arms. The Madonna, in her vault, turns her pleased eyes to the elderly groom in a tender pose. How much human beauty! The user cannot fail to grasp a great message of founding delicacy within any family in time and space. After these experiences of a different model, Lorenzo Chinnici immerses the user in the enveloping world of nature. He affirms in the aforementioned interview: "I deeply love nature in all its most delicate expressions, in its most enchanting landscapes, my landscapes, contrary to the disturbing figures, transmit peace and serenity." The viewer cannot fail to notice that the author abandons himself with heart and mind to the unsettling beauty expressed by chromatic images of absolute charm that pours out into the hidden ravines of infinity. The viewer seems to feel scents and breaths in the various landscapes proposed that he will not be able to forget. In fact, their pictorial conjugation is the common thread of colors, shapes and things from which the creative vein of our Meriese artist springs. Through a centuries-old gigantic, scaly and twisted olive tree trunk that still produces precious olives, beaten and harvested by women and men, as they fill jars with golden oil, the observer realizes that Lorenzo Chinnici intended to show him the inexhaustible endogenous strength of nature. Whoever looks carefully at the paintings that respectively depict two thoroughbreds and five young foals who, in free group, express all their fresh vitality with their smoking nostrils, the mane in the wind and the snappy hocks, cannot but claim to have caught once again thanks to the author's art, the vigorous energy and elegance of the young animals. Anyone who encounters the painting that represents the "Mediterranean storm" with waves with angry and bubbling crests that threaten the safety of three unfortunate boats with three sails each, can affirm that by depicting the decidedly dark and aggressive sky and the frighteningly hostile sea the author has placed before him the majestic power of nature. The observer, continuing to wander around the rich art gallery, still comes across many paintings, such as the well-known "Grape Basket" depicted with disarming realism. Among others, the "PALADINS" who remember Renato Guttuso cannot escape him. These are realistically represented in the act in which they fight with the opponents, brandishing swords with strenuous fury against the opponents. Lorenzo Chinnici in the interview that has already been repeated frankly declares “The first teaching I received from Renato Guttuso whom I met in 1953 on the occasion of an exhibition by the great Master. I was attracted by his painting, by his colors, he looked at me with tenderness, approaching me, I was a fatherless child, his words are still today in my memory. In fact, since then Lorenzo Chinnici has felt close to his fellow countryman Renato Guttuso who privileged freedom of expression with these statements: "Express yourself with absolute sincerity and in a community of spirit, free from any concern, both archaic and neoclassical, both metaphysical and intellectual . Primitive, by necessity, because they were born in an early age. " (From Discourses on sincerity: young people, in L'Ora, April 10-11, 1933). From this springs the keen interest of our Chinnici for men and women of the people as well as for nature depicted with expressive freedom on the basis, also, of "social" art intended by the esteemed master. Through this review of the paintings, the observer understands that the influences received by Lorenzo Chinnici are not limited only to the well-known Renato Guttuso from Bagheria but also to Ugo Nespolo from Vercelli who, engaged in many artistic sectors (texts and poems, scene drawings and costumes, ceramics, sculpture, decoration and more), is inspired by the concept: “bringing art into life”. Lorenzo Chinnici declares that he exhibited for the first time, in 1947, at the age of five, in a bar in his own country. Therefore, from that date up to the present there are about 300 exhibitions presented in various European and non-European countries. This consequently underlines that he has been a guest of many news outlets. He himself legitimately pleased also declares that, on the occasion of the "Meri" event in 2017, my country of birth gives me the keys to the city, honorary citizenship and a museum with rooms dedicated to Lorenzo Chinnici, paradoxically over the years '40 I was considered the last of this country, because I was probably the poorest and most maladjusted of all the inhabitants. ". However, I am grateful to the Municipality of Merì, among other things, for having been made aesthetically more enjoyable by various public paintings by Lorenzo Chinnici, which the press has given ample prominence. Our artist does not stop, as he is constantly under the pressure of his own volcanic ideas, of his own original projects including that of even creating an underwater gallery. He himself declares. “I will do everything to ensure that this project is carried out in Italy, it must remain a Made in Italy creation. Marine museums already exist, there is currently no permanent underwater art gallery composed of paintings by artists. ". In view of the foregoing, the observer cannot fail to affirm that he has found himself in front of an art capable of igniting emotions both through colors, the main protagonists of an articulated discourse, and through brushstrokes designed to give life to the figures, providing them with movement and depth. Lorenzo Chinnici communicates feelings, certainties or perplexities more than a thousand and a thousand words through loving, tender, serene, sad gazes or steady postures or in action. Even through the still life of a painting he causes unequivocal impressions. Lorenzo Chinnici, therefore, demonstrates that he works with an expert hand, with confidence and elegance under the unexpected creative impulse, proposing works of art that emanate an enveloping beauty powerfully emphasized by significant human and social messages. An art, therefore, which, by recounting life on the sea and on land, already speaks for itself. It is an authentic work of art, despite the inexorable passage of time, it always remains to testify its uniqueness and grandeur, wherever it is.

Giuseppe Anania

Trascendent Realism in Human Figurativity in Lorenzo Chinnici

Chinnici's realism goes beyond the simple aspect of memory and truthful representation, moving towards an interpreted, purified, emotional reality.

The artist enhances the drama of bodies with a transcendent vision, to enhance sensations, human characteristics, states of mind.

Chinnici moves the voluminous mass of the figures through the suffering of the action performed with the implication of a strong, almost tormented tension which is quelled and reinvigorated with the support of the color which animates and enhances the spare, essential representation without superstructures.

Giovanni Pantano