Aristide Gattavecchia
Scultore e Pittore
2023 - interview with Leonarda Zappulla
For information and contact details for Aristide Gattavecchia, sculptor and painter, visit the website or write directly to:
aristide@gattavecchia.it
Sculptor and Painter - Italian artist of the 1900s
Sculptor and Painter
Italian artist of the 1900s
“The storytellers of our time 2024”
commented by Vittorio Sgarbi
..." Aristide Gattavecchia lived in Cesena in the same places and during the same years as Alberto Sughi, a painter who was his friend and who died a few years ago. Sughi was a great realist painter, but also an existentialist, and he comes to mind because Gattavecchia's painting does not show any consonance or affinity with Sughi, but there is a climate, the idea of a place on earth where you can feel the profound dimension of spirituality, which is what the world of Romagna expresses in its greatest, warmest representations, such as those of an artist like Fellini.
That's it, the idea of feeling that Romagna where the fog often hides and reminds us of that Fellini film with that character who says, “Where have I ended up?” because he no longer recognizes anything around him, “But if this is the afterlife, it's not a nice thing!”
That is, feeling lost in these constant mists, in these fumes, which are the fumes of places where there is no longer any life, were a reason for deep reflection for Gattavechia, as were his silhouettes of figures reminiscent of Sironi's great paintings, but everything is as if seen in the afterlife, in a hell where it is difficult to find light.
So his painting is both dramatic and existential.
In this regard, it must be said that the references I have made are those that serve to convey that he was not alone in this condition of existential unease.
He was able to leave us very important signs of his human relationships, in portraits such as La Bruna (The Brunette) from 1960, which is a remarkable portrait of great power, and in some landscapes in which the nudes are headless like classical sculptures, ancient sculptures.
It is something that has to do with the feeling of a world that no longer has any certain reference points, where there are no longer any secure values and everything, even families at the seaside, are seen from behind, as if to represent a condition of unhappiness and inadequacy.
Among his significant works, there is certainly this foggy landscape of a ghostly Cesena, which becomes like a place in the afterlife.
However, his loyalty to his homeland does not make him a vernacular artist who depicts Romagna as something picturesque, but rather as something with a profound sense of dramatic existence, which was his own, with the themes of landscape that are so much talked about today.
The climate, therefore, pollution, the end of the certainty of a harmonious world, and all this is represented in such an intensely dramatic way that it makes us reflect even today (he died in 1994) on a crisis in the world in which we feel a profound unease.
Then faces like that of this wonderful female figure, “La Bruna,” give us the sense that humanity is resisting but that around us there is a precipitate fall of the world, there is an increasingly unhappy nature, and we must somehow try to defend ourselves by staying close, being close to one another, to avoid being overwhelmed.
This hope, in the end, in his generally pessimistic vision, is a significant sign of the legacy that Gattavecchia leaves us with his painting."
Prof. Vittorio Sgarbi