Riccardo Guarneri

Biography

Riccardo Guarneri was born in Florence in 1933. In his youth he felt attracted to music and became a musician but also began to paint. During a tour of the Netherlands, in The Hague he visits an exhibition on the last Rembrandt. He is struck by these works in which the dark background is crossed by lightning bolts of light and golden gleams. He then abandoned the music to devote himself completely to painting, beginning to insert the theme of light on his first works that are informal works. He held his first solo exhibition in The Hague, in 1960, but immediately abandoned the" Informal", which did not feel like his own, to focus his research on the minimal sign and light, also driven, in this research, by the knowledge of the artists of the German Concrete Art, Otto Piene, Raimund Girke, Winfred and Barbara Gaul, Hans J. Glargfelder among others. In addition, the attendance of artists such as Claudio Verna, Piero Dorazio, Cy Twombly, to name a few, pushes Riccardo Guarneri to exasperate his research to the essentiality of the gesture consisting of bands of light that cross the painting, fine lines, soft and nuanced colors. He frequents the Genoa environment where with a group of artists, Attilio Carreri, Arnaldo Esposito, Gianni Stirone and others, he founded the group "Time 3" to signify the abstract phase that followed the classical and the informal. He participated in the 1966 Venice Biennale and the 1967 Paris Biennale. In the mid-1960s it approached the Programmed Art by inserting geometric shapes with sharp angles and curved lines into the works and where the color gradually lightens to such an extent that the works become almost white. This activity culminates in the 1971 exhibition Concret Art at the Westfalischer Kunstverein in Munster. In the mid-1970s with its "almost white" and its geometric shapes enters the movement of the Analytical Art or Painting Painting, a current that no longer abandons. He participated in the Rome Quadriennale of 1973 and 1986 and in numerous competitions receiving numerous awards, Termoli, Acireale, Prague, Florence, Capo d'Orlando, etc. In 1981 at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome he exhibited in the exhibition"Lines of Artistic Research in Italy 1960-1980". This exhibition comes after re-enacted in 1997 at the Kunstahalle in Cologne. In 2000 he realized the project for a mosaic of 24 square meters. which is located in the "Lucio Sestio" station of the Rome metro. In 2004 at the Gallery of Modern Art of Palazzo Pitti in Florence holds the anthology exhibition"ContrappuntOluce". In 2007, following the renewed interest in Art Analytics he was invited to Milan to the Palazzo della Permanente for the exhibition Painting Analytical. In 2008 Riccardo Guarneri is among the artists of the exhibition "Aniconic Painting" at the Casa del Mantegna in Mantua. In the following years, numerous solo exhibitions were organized both in Italy and abroad, culminating in 2017, with the invitation with a personal room at the 57th Venice Biennale. He has taught in numerous academies of Fine Arts: Carrara, Florence, Venice, Bari. His works can be found in numerous museums both Italian and foreign, Florence, Turin, Parma, Venice, Munster, Dusseldorf, Gugenheim in New York. Riccardo Guarneri lives and works in Florence.

Tags: Riccardo Guarneri - Guarneri - Concrete Art - Programmed Art - Analytical Painting - Painting Painting - Aniconic Painting - Concret Art

Contributions

I let the light of white emerge. I wanted everything to become very light, transparent, hard to decipher. Fascinated by the inks of the Zen masters, I worked on white paintings and, with pencils or watercolors, which transfigured their own color into lightness and nuance, I gave the brightness I wanted, which later became characteristic of my works. The light comes from the transparencies, from inside the painting, and is projected into the exterior. I always thought about music .... After all, there is everything in her, there is the continuous mutation of doing that always renews everything. There is a change in method, a concept that has permeated my work. I think there is a need to give value not to redundancy and spectacularity, to superficial nonsense, but to what has a profound, sensitive value, which touches the interior. The work of art must strive to communicate every possible value, such as literature, music

Riccardo Guarneri

Riccardo Guarneri - Analytical Painting

Analytical Painting, otherwise called Painting-Painting,developed in Italy in the late 1960s on the back of similar French and German experiences. Analytical Painting is detached from the relationship between the work and its meaning, obvious (figurative) or underlying (conceptual) or expressive (abstractism), but focuses on a kind of introspective investigation of the intrinsic elements that constitute it, namely canvas, frame, color, sign, and the relationship between the work and its author. The epicentre of this movement was certainly Italian and was carried out by a large group of artists including Claudio Olivieri, Elio Marchegiani, Riccardo Guarneri, Giorgio Griffa, Rodolfo Aricò and Gianfranco Zappettini. The movement had international resonance consecrated by exhibitions at European private museums and galleries, including The Museum of Modern Art in Paris, the Venice Biennale, Documenta of Kassel. The drive that Analytical Art had in the artistic environment resulted in the Trans-Avant-garde,a movement that led to the reappreciable appreciation of painting

Tags: Analytical Painting - Painting Painting - Riccardo Guarneri - Gianfranco Zappettini