Critics / Press

The World of Lorenzo Chinnici

It’s easy to be happy in Sicily, but it requires an adjustment that is as much biological as cultural: learning to live on Sicilian time. (Sicilian Odyssey – Francine Prose)

It can be summed up in a few lines the immense concept of "life in Sicily" ... because one must live it, and the artist Lorenzo Chinnici has made Sicily his world, made of a strip of beach by the sea, captures the senses of endless beauty, in a habitat of nature, sea, sand, cadenced rhythms that follow the waves and then the wind and the raging sea, each equally beautiful and charming. But also the sun, palm trees, marinas full of painted wooden boats, and then the earth, prickly pears, the dialect, the colours of green, abandoned boats, people, men who look at you in the face, painful but not resigned, a whole world of memories linked to his land, his inspiration that he has discovered, as a boy, that you live in Sicily to another rhythm, watching the golden sun and the crystal sea. Lorenzo Chinnici‘s love for his land is expressed on the canvas, with its overbearing and shameless colours. From his early approaches with the teachings of Renato Guttuso, the brush technique and then having to master the techniques of Salvatore La Rosa, the attendance of the Art Workshop of Salvatore Fiume, the importance of knowledge with other great artists such as Mario Rossello, Giuseppe Migneco, Sassu, Ernesto Treccani, Ugo Nespolo, a past life to "tell" this land, stealing colours, painting with his hands but above all with the heart, the passionate red fire of Etna to the blue sea, the white of its snow, nature, cacti, flowers, the greenery and much more….

Cristina Vannuzzi Landini

Fire on the water

Lorenzo was born in late spring. At a very young age with his indomitable character and stubbornness, Lorenzo was determined that his life could never do without art, and so it has been for over half a century.
Lorenzo during his youth, working and studying, painfully and with difficulty, constantly stirring artistic inspiration, anger, grief, poverty, rage at work, strenuously defending his thinking and art-making. Without giving in, he followed his instinct with titanic force, with his unremitting efforts and the adversities of life, always doing art, encouraging everyone to consider him and his work.
Art for Lorenzo encompasses the catalogue of figurative arts.
He worked tirelessly from his early age, against the barriers of life. This hardness means that Lorenzo has not lived his life like any of his peers but with the spirit of a previous generation, as if he wanted to be, himself, the father who was not there.
With this absence and pain, through his brushes Lorenzo wants to communicate this suffering which dominated most of his life.
Through these conditions of life, colours are connected with timeless memories, mythological or even more distant.
To share these strong and concrete moods you add the "Sicilian", that sense of mystery, sensuality, opulence and laziness that the islanders have inherited from several different overlapping cultures, which make the beauty of Sicily the most languid and penetrating Island.
Gathered here in the beautiful surroundings of lake Lecco are about twenty works which is a very limited portion of the Master's production.
Among these paintings one can recognize particular views certainly not tied to Sicily but rather views of lake Lombard or other seas.
But his message is always to tell the human story, the daily reality of life, the unremitting battle, that man, is called to bear under any sky, on the shores of a sea or a lake, the land of the Cyclops or on that of the Lombards.
We find in the landscapes rare clarity and freshness, that rarefies every pain in the atmosphere of a still warm sun. Still lifes full of colours and flavours, but not lost in a timeless dream, framed in the everyday reality of life.
Most of the paintings depicts human scenes, linked to a simple and elemental life of suffering spending their life mostly working long hours during long days.
Lorenzo Chinnici is a painter of the human form and these paintings have a deep breath that almost burns your nostrils, giant figures which are not constrained to the size of the canvas, painted directly with a brush that makes forms and colour at the same time.
The epic scope of the canvases where towering fishermen intent on their hard work capturing the last efforts of the animals lifes.
The large canvases with the female nudes depict the softness of the womanly flesh, without the grace of the French "Baigneuse", here the feminine beauties are worn down by fatigue, which from a distance looks close to death.
Among the poets of the twentieth century Eugenio Montale has dealt with a lot of depth of the "mal de vivre" externalizing an uncomfortable condition that is a characteristic of the human condition, here, to the poetry so little pleasing, which puts in very little words such as "bald peaks" or "sharp shards of glass", has affected Lorenzo Chinnici’s images.
Like Eugene Montale he has the sea and the sun in his eyes, but the suffering of life is rampant and submerges everything, leaving us to contemplate the infinite motionless horizon, which echoes in us, deeply, pain so old as the time from which man inhabits the earth.

Emanuela Catalano

Fire on the water - Lake Como

This multi-focused exhibition presented by Dorothy De Rubeis - the most extroverted Italian gallery owner – presents an intriguing mix of hallmark pieces and new works and is set to become the Artistic Event of Summer on Lake Como.
Fire on the Water is a celebration of the many forms of Italian creativity, including poetry, painting, theatre, fashion, and music. Such complete, multi-faceted, engaging and glamorous artistic events are rarely seen in Italy.
Curator Emanuela Catalano describes the exhibition as “a frame surrounding the figurative art from Maestro Lorenzo Chinnici.”
The goal of the event is to create an unforgettable memory of MADE IN ITALY. Rather than art being confined in solemn, lifeless exhibitions that don’t engage the public, Fire on the Water aims to create a dialogue with the observer and give the art work the glamour it deserves.

FIRE ON THE WATER

The event will be illuminated by the colours of Lorenzo’s paintings, which speak of humanity in opulent yet defeated forms, and the art photography of Nini Ferrara, whose work depicts precise portraits of humanity.
The creativity and the strength which have brought to us the birth of MADE IN ITALY are represented in these pieces.
Live performances will feature high fashion models showcasing dresses created specifically for this exhibition by Katerina Budnikova and inspired by Master Lorenzo Chinnici's paintings.
An enchanting piano will accompany the magnificent voices of Soprano Anna Gorbachyova and the Tenor Rodolfo Maria Bordini who will sing melodies of the Italian Masters. Jazz singer Beatrice Zanolini will remind the audience that with only seven signs of a pentagram, creativity can give rise to endless, infinitely different music combinations.
Poetry readings by Nini Ferrara and Giusy Nicosia will remind us of the delicacy and beauty of words, which can act as a soothing balm for the spirit of the listener.
As in "La Grande Bellezza" of Sorrentino, this artistic meeting - which also has gained the interest of FAI (Fondo Ambiente Italiano) - will celebrate an incredible number of protagonists to create a truly Beautiful Event.
Ampellio Ramaioli, director of this production, has curated everything down to the last detail with the collaboration of Domenico Parisi and his staff at Six Inch. In addition, the owner of the famous Cantina Valenti will be present in order to raise a glass and host a toast with all the guests. He will be at the disposal of the public to showcase and discuss his purple nectar in detail.
We would like to acknowledge and thank World Fashion Channel TV – our official partner for the event.

Emanuela Catalano

THE MANUFACTURER OF IDEAS

Catania – Sicily, with "FABER - THE MANUFACTURER OF IDEAS" at the forefront, an event created by the Professor Anna Petino and the entrepreneur Giulia Velis.

The event will take place on December 16 and 17, from 10.00 to 22.00 at the historic Palazzo Manganelli and will host 40 exhibitors from all over Sicily, which will present their creations in the splendid rooms of the palace. It is going to be a unique occasion, since the palace is normally closed to the public.

After the great success associated with the opening of a museum dedicated to the painter Lorenzo Chinnici in Merì, the artist's birthplace, Maestro exhibits his most famous paintings at the Palazzo Manganelli, which portray industriousness typically associated with manual labor, representing craftsmen’s toil in poetic light.

Thus the ancient and aristocratic Palazzo Manganelli, which since the twentieth century has belonged to the heirs of the Princes of the Borghese dynasty of Rome, will be the setting for Chinnici's artworks, which will symbolically dialogue with the artisan goods made in Sicily, known for their excellence.

"Here and now we touch on the theme of the toil of time that flows and plows the effort of tension and creative thought. In fact, the process of creation is what makes a woman and a man more alive and aware of their potential and their being-in-the-world.

It is said that the "brain is greater than the sky" because the source of the image is in the mind and it is where the stimulus for the arts is born, which, in their turn, create, touch and give shape to the objects of the time.

The characters of Lorenzo Chinnici's paintings are animated by manual work, by being present through their industriousness. There is no laziness, there is no static condition, not even in the spatial dimension, which makes their muscles stretch elongating the perception of the pictorial space.

Thus the observer is invited to reflect and to rest his gaze on the light and the shadows of the bodies deeply engaged in different activities against the background of Sicily, presented as a spiritual entity, a symbolic macrocosm, which unites people's desires and breaths.

The sense of fatigue is related to existence itself in the artistic world of Chinnici, in that manual and artisanal work that he wants to honor, to portray and to immortalize."

Nilla Zaira D'Urso

The Realism of Lorenzo Chinnici

In the halls of art of the Palazzo della Provincia of Messina, will be a personal exhibition of the works of the master Lorenzo Chinnici. The rooms will host the works of the artist from 11th to 17th March.

In the current revival that characterises the present season of painting in many respects there is a preference for good abstraction rather than a true representation of reality, that reality which for a long time has been the window through which art has been viewed.

In this trend there is also the wish to remove oneself from that double confrontation not only with reality (landscapes and the figures therein), but above all with that which the artist has already produced in the long history of observing the reality of the world which surrounds us.

Lorenzo Chinnici an artist who has arrived at the peak of his maturity has fully immersed himself in the painting of reality rediscovering the taste for the depiction of daily life, of that view that is born directly from the observation of the reality which surrounds us. Chinnici’s selected theme is eloquently expressed, depicting on the one hand his beloved Sicilian landscape and on the other the characters who inhabit this landscape. With all their joys, their little dramas, their anger and their boredom.

In doing this the artist (Born Merí NE Sicily 1942) while keeding his feet firmly planted on the ground, rather with his art strongly linked to the earth, avoids that great error to which so many succumb, that is a sterile depiction of reality, not only in the illusion of being able to improve on it, but above all betraying the fundamental tenets of the artist which form part of his very right to exist. That is to place himself in a world apart not a mirror but a projection of reality.

One therefore notices in the recent artistic output of Chinnici how in his realism, if on the one hand he has eliminated the filters of memory and consciousness, he has fully assumed as his guide a total participation in the world viewed through the eyes, from which he derives an interpretative reality, filtered from sentimental constraints. There is in fact the desire to recover moments from an almost commonplace

world that the artist is charged to save from it’s condemnation to anonymity. This Chinnici does for example when he paints the fatigue of fishermen, or when he brings to the canvas glimpses of peasants, or landscapes from infancy where everything seems narrow and limited.

If in doing this the artist assumes the role almost of a reporter of the present, reducing art to the mundane or, bestowing on the mundane the dignity of art, his realism offers also another aspect, that gives him the ability to squeeze the mundane to harvest on the canvas the juice of a sensation, of a participation sometimes sad, sometimes nostalgic, sometimes dramatic.

It is this the other level of reading that such pictures allow and makes it easy to see above and beyond the mere iconografic representation, the emotional state from which it is born and which it provokes, and so the human figures, usually very well drawn, imply a strong tension almost torment, while the landscapes seem a prelude and an invitation to a peaceful conquest, and an anxiety satisfied by serenity.

S.Rossi