ENZO ARCHETTI

THE GREAT UNIVERSE OF ARCHETTI

"Gold travels alone and settles where it knows it is welcomed. It flies light, bright, imperceptible, but when it stops it dictates, it does not accept compromises, it wants to be the absolute protagonist. A breath of gold arrives without knocking and, as if by magic, the colours leave it all the space it requires: they no longer argue, including red which has always been the most energetic and aggressive colour. The colours then all bow to gold because they know that it, and only it was able to steal the light from the sun to give it back to us in all its splendour. Gold does not love reality, it travels further ... it is a breath of light and energy full of feelings that you cannot stop". In this thought lies the whole essence of Enzo Archetti: his way of feeling, speaking, living through art.

I spend a morning with him in his studio "not the one in the Centre, the big one where I do great things". It is a condensation of colour, of shapes, of abstraction that surrounds you, that captures the eye by placing it on the details. He explains his works to me, interprets them according to his feelings of that moment when the idea started. I try to see what his eyes see and I realize that I see something else too, that I feel emotions that belong only to me. It is an initial sharing that then transforms and takes me to worlds that perhaps exist for everyone. It is an extraordinary feeling. Do try.

Enzo Archetti is a painter even if his paintings have that thickness that is similar to sculpture. I don't know where to start defining his art. Help ... “I would like to be able to blend the informal, the abstract, what is linked to emotions with things that have no logic, with the figurative. These women could have a name and a surname and perhaps at the beginning they even had it, but now they have become just entities, they are icons to explain that in the world there is beauty but also ugliness, horror". So these sky-eyed women you can enter and lose yourself in become the realization of that positive part that is predominant in Archetti. Around them, depending on the moment, they also have tangles, difficulties, the obstacles of life. It is a dense painting, both from a real and a conceptual point of view.

My eye stops on the golden brushstroke, enchanted by that desire to be transported into a dimension that cancels suffering to ferry towards serenity. I remain silent. “Do you prefer the abstract right? - he asks me. - Sure, because you don't want intermediaries in your life. In my paintings there is no logic, they are informal in the sense that they have no form”. Or they have endless. Archetti tells his work as if he were talking about living things, and basically they are. He does not take himself seriously, in the sense that he does not flaunt, that simplicity in display becomes an added value to a world that is all behind. You have to want to discover to understand. Canvas on canvas, colour that covers or reveals, networks, different materials. Glitter and those golden brushstrokes that leave a trail in the soul. “It is a wave of positivity in this moment of crisis in which everyone is with their heads down. It's true, it's not a good moment but there is still something beautiful that should still be seen”.

Do you paint every day? “Sometimes I destroy what I created in the previous days and I do it with great violence. But in recent years I have accumulated so much energy that if I don't come to the studio I feel bad, I get a headache”. He smiles as he talks to me and you feel that he would like to tell his world about him without losing even a single detail.

Do you have dreams? "Many. I would like to capture all the beautiful and light things that exist on this planet. Even in my figures there is the dream”. Then he looks at me and sees the amazement. “No, I don't dream of a bigger studio or an attic”. He smiles again. He does not take himself seriously, in the sense that he does not flaunt, that he is not an artist, he is, inside. That he uses simplicity in exposition to add value to a feeling that is real. And it's good, even if I'm not crazy about the term. It is. There is darkness in his paintings, but there is also light, light. There is what is life with its dark and light parts, with its contradictions, with the swing of the heart. I see the word love on some canvas, it shines through the colour. "Sometimes the malaise pushes me to start a job but then I don't want to say that everything is horrible and then I put the beautiful, bright part into it". Sometimes even the golden brushstroke.

While I speak, he peels the figs from his tree. “These are true”. Gold even close to rust: “Everyone says it's ugly and they want to get rid of it. Instead I find it has a nice, hard but beautiful part. It's a wall but behind it there are wonderful things, just jump over it”. And then time. It often occurs in his sentences.

Does time help? "Almost always". Almost? “We must not just hope and wait, there must be flight"

Paola Viani

Fausto Lorenzi "FRAGMENTS OF INFINITY" (Journal of Brescia 22/02/2007)

... "It is an illustrated artist's book with 44 pictorial works on canvas, in which the written word becomes the rhythm of the image and the image melts back into the flow of writing. The journey, in an artist who had already given us "diary pages" in painting, is precisely between fragments of existence, small daily occasions, opacity and glimmers of light. There is a plastic language of fable or poetry - Archetti tells us with his operation -, an evidence - that does not refuse any body to words. The story of him, in fact, of the poem shows the attempt to go beyond the confines of the word to become figurative writing, a painted word, a poetic object, that is, a book written “inside and out”.

The acrobatics of the image, between small spells and chimeras, morgane fairies perhaps entrusted to a simple hat profile as if to suggest a "woman's scent", is the side of the most serene confidence of this dreamlike alphabet. Happier, when the painting advances in an entirely interior resonance of the image, the memory entrusted to the expressiveness of the material itself, as if it imprinted and knotted on the canvases the slightest accidents and small debris of the days, or sometimes probed the gates of infinity, in larger backgrounds or in larger colour flows. Then it becomes a form, a rhythm of poetic narration to name things allusively, opening sparkling spaces of wink and dream, mirages of experience and interpretation of the whole, infinite combinations and multiplications of meaning.

The most pleasing aspect of the operation is precisely in probing a line of intraverbal research, to exploit values, echoes, resonances that are released within the writing, to stretch all the fibres and ribs of the images. In this way it shows us how a form, even the most codified, is nothing but a case of the image.

We move in a territory of words and images that cannot be divided, while the order of the written story is overturned in a vicissitude of signs and colours: the more the author tries to circumscribe the field of experience - in a detail, a fragment, like the notes of the music box that give rise to the adventures of this book - the more it opens up vague perspectives within itself, as if in every point - or fragment - a passage opens onto infinity ("but dreams are still sacred?")….

https://elefantini.wordpress.com/2013/12/04/enzo-archetti/
by Simba, Elefantini (My journey on the curved horizon)

Enzo Archetti
December 4, 2013

While in Venice last week, I stumbled upon many, many amazing artists in galleries, exhibitions, and leftover displays from the biennale. Thus, time to share the discoveries.

The first artist that caught my eye was Enzo Archetti (1947-), a contemporary painter from Brescia. All of the paintings that I have seen from him were large renditions of faces with bold strokes of colour and incorporated fabric, yet is seems that he has done various series with various subjects. I remain most enthusiastic about the portraits, although that may be because it’s the brushstrokes and layers that I have seen personally and thus recall the composition with more presence than the other thumbnails.

According to his biography, Enzo developed an interest in art in his later high school years, although he studied lettere at university. He then frequented the Accademia Carrara di Bergamo for drawing and etching. Painting he never formally studied, though that is his current preferred media: oil, acrylic, fresco, collage… whichever the media and method, the style is easy to recognize.
 

Enzo claims that he views art as a language through which he can express himself to others, and through time, this depiction shifted from the realistic to the abstract. Incorporating ideas of the past, music, musings, and travel, Enzo has by now learned that he is not the one with a message. Rather, it is the art that has something to tell, and he is merely the body used to express the sentiment.

His latest series is entitled E la gente va (‘and the people go’), which consists of 66 pieces depicting the metaphorical journey of man, from sunrise to sunset and beyond. In short, it is a series about movement, about life being played out on an open-air stage.

Regardless of his philosophy, there is something captivating in his paintings, something that lures you in and refuses to let you walk away without a thorough examination of every corner.

E-mail: info@hayhillgallery.com