Renato Guerrini

Studio
Via Stazione S.Pietro, 16
00165 Rome - Italy
Phone: +39 6 39366173

A true artist like Guerrini always brings his own background to bear, complex emotions that well up from his past and from the culture that went into making him. His inspiration must always draw from a very personal spiritual point of view and what he does, the symbols he creates will always end up being original. The fact that his work is realistic gradually loses importance; it even takes on an unnaturalcharacter which is open to any number of possible interpretations. He becomes, as it were, a mediator between the real world of visual perception and a remembered phantasy world where he hopes to find refuge. The authentic artist transforms more visual stimuli into a lyrical vision of meanings which go far beyond the objects themselves. Nobel prize winning scientist Rita Levi Montalcini has described this process as when the "demands of the environment" actually manage to "nurture intellectual potential", where raised emotional tension aid us in grasping the secrets of Reality.

Thoughts like these spring to mind spontaneously when we look at Guerrini's canvasses, the objects we see in them, as well as the emotions they arouse in us. At heart of them all is a real likeness to objective reality which has nevertheless been transformed by the deft hand of the artist; the resulting compositions are rich in many layers of meaning - they represent a look backward at an ancient and haunting land.
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Guerrini's works show off the appealing side of things which have been seen and then subsequently recreated as if through the power of a personal form of magic. Guerrini is closely in touch with the world around him but distances himself as soon as the starts to represent it. There is a kind of correspondence between the silence of his scenes and the emotionts aroused in those who look on them. Even the contrasting light that seems to tear apart his forests or cut up the side of a tree trunk is suggestive of silence. Nature in Guerrini's act of recreation is synonymous with visual truth. Even when the crude physicality of objects like thorny bushes or rocks would seem to seem to drag the painting towards a kind of painful realis the attempt to create another reality always prevails; it goes so far as to suggest the possibility of a longed for utopian refuge; there is the same painful feeling of hopeless longing for his female nudes.
Stereotypical colours almost never find their way into these paintings, if anything the faces seem gaunt and sharp in an attempt to avoid banality at any cost. Both when he is working in pencil and with the brush the idea is to make use of "contrast" in order to create unity and harmony.

Dino Carlesi

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