Gianni Realini fra arte e grafica

The exhibition is part of a series of thematic in-depth studies of contemporary artists linked to the Canton of Ticino by birth or by activity, and presents the first anthological exhibition on Gianni Realini (Sorengo, 1943).

Gianni Realini can boast a highly articulated artistic career. His path begins, after his training in Ticino, with the strong fascination with Paris and the encounter with the great masters; it continues in the economic boom of the 1960s and then in the uprisings of 1968, which marked him deeply and led him to record the intellectual crisis of those years also on canvas. He then briefly approaches the expressive modes of Pop Art and then Informal Art, which he declines in a very personal manner with an adherence that later reaches Abstract Expressionism in which, however, the human figure and landscape remain desirable.

Gianni Realini's painting thus opens up to a more pronounced gesturality, his works become increasingly large and important; from the light colours created by the nuances between white and grey, he moves on to a more pronounced chromatism, without neglecting the contents linked to a new figuration. His research also continues in the accentuation of chromaticism, pigments marked in contrasts, and strong, decisive signs.

With the end of the 1980s, there is a shift from an increasingly investigated Abstract Expressionism towards the Action painting of Jackson Pollock and he opens up to the aesthetic reflections of an environmental art. After his American journey at the end of the 1990s, Gianni Realini's artistic gesture became more avowed and engaging thanks to a very personal expressive style. At the same time, his canvases or large panels constitute moments of waiting and fulfilment, of action and suspension. In the colour, applied with strength and abundance, he often leaves drips that also attribute a temporal value to the work itself.

On display at Spazio Officina -covering a chronological span of five decades of creative activity and conceptual research - are more than one hundred works, including graphics, small and large-format material canvases, plastic works, graphics and gouaches. What particularly characterises this exhibition is that this is the first time an anthological exhibition of the Ticino artist's work has been realised, which opens with the most salient graphic production expressed in the various techniques - from woodcut to etching (also with extemporary watercolours), from aquatint to drypoint, from monotype to lithography - all of great executive level.