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Artist Statement:
Luciano Chinese
He has been defined by the
critic as member the
Spatialist Movement, founded
by Lucio Fontana 1n 1942. He
is indeed the last Spatialist
artist alive and actively
working. His art pieces are
considered
painting-sculptures, featuring
glued Murano glasses and
mirror pieces, with bright
colour backgrounds.
Luciano's artworks are found
in several Museums and
Galleries:
- Museo Pagani, Castellanza di
Varese
- Museo Candiani, Mestre,
Venice
- Archivio Storico della
Biennale di Venezia,
- Fondazione Ragghianti di
Lucca
- Archivio Storico dell’Arte
Moderna e Contemporanea Museo
Bandera of Busto Arsizio
(Varese),
- Istituto di Cultura Tedesca
a Firenze, (Florence)
- Centro Friulano Arti
Plastiche di Udine, Biblioteca
Nazionale Isontina of Gorizia,
- Dates Automovil España,
Barcelona (Spain),
- Quadriennale di Roma,
- Museo Cantonale d’Arte di
Lugano (Swiss),
- Catalogo Comanducci,
- Museo vetrario Berengo
(Murano – Venice).
- Kara Art (Jussy, Swiss)
- Galerie Sauveur Bismuth
(Paris)
- Galerie Artodrome
(Forchheim, Germany)
- Galerie Bohner (Mannheim,
Germany and Seoul, Korea)...
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Artist Exhibitions:
2007
From 3rd. to 6th. March,
Artefiera Vicenza.
From 16th September, the
Gallery Artodrome of
Forchheim, Germany , organised
an exhibition with the latest
paintings of the Artist.
Art Fair of Salzburg, Austria.
(Sept.- Oct.)
From 8th to 11th November, the
Gallery Boenher of Mannheim,
Germany, presented chosen
paintings of the ...
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Artist Galleries:
GALLERIA NUOVO SPAZIO (2
seats)
Gallery in Venice
Via Piraghetto 41, 30171
Mestre, VE , Italia
Tel. ++39 041 920054 / Fax
++39 0481 69555
E-mail: nuovospazio@libero.it
Gallery in Udine:
Via Manin 8 int.7 -Palazzo
Manin-
Tel. +39 0432 204163 / Fax +39
0432 203317
GALERIE SAUVEUR BISMUTH.
73 ...
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Artist Reviews:
Articles about Luciano Chinese
have been published on:
La Nuova Venezia, 16/12/2005
Il Friuli, 10/12/2005
Il Messaggero Veneto,
09/12/2005
Il Messaggero Veneto,
06/11/2005
Il Gazzettino 20/03/2005
Il Gazzettino di Venezia,
19/03/2005
Il Gazzettino, 16/04/2004
ABC, Barcellona-...
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Collections:
Museo Pagani, Castellanza di
Varese
Museo Candiani, Mestre,
Venezia
Archivio Storico della
Biennale di Venezia,
Fondazione Ragghianti di Lucca
Archivio Storico dell’Arte
Moderna e Contemporanea Museo
Bandera di Busto Arsizio
(Varese),
Istituto di Cultura Tedesca a
Firenze,
Centro Friulano Arti Plastiche
di Udine, Biblioteca Nazionale
Isontina di Gorizia,
Dates ...
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Commissions:
Dates Automóvil España SL,
Barcelona, Spain
Private Collection Ambra
Altissimo, Cortina d'Ampezzo,
Italy
Private Collection
Barbaro-Rosato, Barcelona,
Spain
Museo Pagani, Milan, Italy
Museo Candiani, Mestre-Venice,
Italy
Private collection,
Association of Citroen
Dealers, Madrid, Spain...
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Luciano Chinese Biography:
| Biographical information for Luciano Chinese can be found below. The artist may choose what information to display. Sometimes the artist chooses not to display personal information to the general public. |
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Age
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65
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| Gender |
Male
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| Status |
Married
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| Children |
2
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| Religion |
not provided |
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| Education |
Masters of Fine Arts |
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| Hobbies / Interests |
Making my own "Picolit" wine.
Walking around together with my dog Bobby. |
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| Favorite Artistic Medium |
Painting Other
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| Favorite Arthistory Movement |
Abstract Art - (1910 - )
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| Favorite Visual Artist |
Lucio Fontana
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| Favorite Work of Art |
not provided
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| Biggest Artistic Inspiration |
not provided |
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| Why Did You Become An Artist |
not provided |
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| Your Personal Biography |
Evolutions of colour
"because to everything nothing of the origin bud"
by the art criticist Alfonso Gatto
Luciano Chinese is an artist who entered the international scene a few years ago, although his vocation for painting had never flickered, not even when he left his studies, first at the Academy and later at the University of Architecture in Venice, because he was forced to dedicate his time to other activities in order to make a living. Nevertheless, these activities were always in the same field and he was able to promote and organise important cultural events, subsequently opening art galleries in towns in the Veneto and Friuli areas, the latter being the land of his birth, and through which he has introduced and promoted worthwhile Italian and foreign artists.
Already known for these merits, when he returned to his ever more pressing original vocation, which he has pursued since the nineteen-eighties with increasing continuity and variety in his work, insufficient attention was paid to the value of his pictorial efforts, rightly demanded since they were owned and displayed by prestigious museums. The many intellectual interests that he has continued to cultivate have not therefore encouraged a more committed and widespread critical response to his creative work or, more precisely, it was not perhaps considered that the artist needed such authoritative confirmation. In spite of this, in recent decades Chinese has managed to travel, with his researches, an experimental inclination of considerable weight, directing his expressive language in a direction that combines new etymons of colour and space, even using recovered materials particularly glass in order to attain further effects of luminous reflection with intriguing visual proposals.
The years spent in Venice, between 1956 and 1970, in contact with the spatialist group have clearly influenced his work, already marked by elegant imaginative proposals in the wake of a cosmologism variously conjugated, at the time, by certain protagonists of the first and second wave of Futurism, by Balla and then by Fillia and Crali, onto whose imprint the harmonic and vibrant matter of his pictorial images and the successful depiction of other "possible worlds" have fecundly grafted.
It seems in any case certain that the artist?s imagination tends to move between vital instances from informal poetics ? the strong material gestuality of his ?reliefs? ? and the urgency of a fantastic dreamlike expansion in a determinant cosmic-spatial projection that has allowed him to correspond in the same manner with the creative stimulating formulations of Lucio Fontana. Rather, this last reference has shown to be anything but occasional, because certain imperious proofs especially on the instrumental plane, immediately evident in the more recent works, directly recall the experimental practices already used with extraordinary inventiveness by the founder of the Spatialism Movement. And not only for the use, also by Chinese, of glassy materials, of silvered and gilt blades, but for the formal execution, in particular those relating to the almost analogous construction of rotating globular elements on the surface, drawing vast orbits, eccentric movements, segnic constellations of elegant spatial structuring.
The basic elements of Chinese?s linguistic repertory thus result subsumed by these various sources, which have substantially inspired him to carry forward a conception of abstraction that is both geometric and lyrical, of constructive rigour in a certain sense Cartesian and of expressive freedom, disciplined only by a seductive fanciful inspiration, thus opening his pictorial vision to exhilarating hues, to turbulent linear rhythms that race along with the relentless impetus of energetic flows on the panels of the surfaces.
In the compositions there is a dominant yearning for the absolute, a powerfully expressed urge to manifest an idea of infinitum that the artist in a certain sense clearly postulates, by depicting, through the orbital evolution of numerous geometric bodies, spheres, ellipses, spirals, shapes of a sublime cosmology that would seem to refer to the allure of the revolutionary speculative hypotheses of Giordano Bruno, but which in effect, does not lie outside the safest theoretical elaborations supplied, nowadays, by quantum physics.
The geometric finite of these spatial bodies, on the other hand, come within the short circuit with the infinite adimensional of the basis, so that it seems as though Chinese intends, here to mime or simulate a gesture of overcoming the surface that in Fontana is presented with the radicalism of a physical theft and as a threshold of a truly real elsewhere. In Chinese that gesture assumes instead a precise symbolic significance or, rather, it is configured as a metaphor of painting as a universe in expansion, attempting nonetheless to overcome the futurist pretence of representing it mechanically, but also of evoking the complex and mysterious formation in a purely revealing transcending of light-colour, such as we find in the phantasmagorical resolutions of the Venetian spatialists. On the other hand, Chinese's pictorial investigation is of a more empirical than eidetic nature, rather also the use of the glassy materials connects, in effect, to the Byzantine tradition of the mosaic artists of the San Marco cathedral, which he studied as a student at the Academy.
A few decades later, the artist therefore returns to the memory of this knowledge and to the turbulent parabolas of the lines and the circular geometries that marked his previous paintings lyrically abstract now grafts on these mirrored relics, pieces of mosaic, rejected fragments from the kilns of Murano, further elements of an imaginative alchemy that he has brought to sublimate the imaginative acrobatics of the aerial and almost intangible matter of his forms.
In any case, Chinese has always acted on different linguistic and instrumental repertories, first fascinated by the slender threads of Alexander Calder and by the eurhythmic geometrics of Luigi Veronesi as can be seen from paintings such as "Evento Spaziale" [Spatial Event] from 2006 and "Architetture Spaziali" [Spatial architectures] from the same year, which even re-proposes in a renewed version the typical abstract-concrete lexis but at the same time he is oriented to pursuing a singular process of approach to the experimental problems of Fontana and within these references and comparisons has matured with time an increasingly independent expressive conception.
Matter, form, space in fact represent the principal terms of this structural development of the image that not only uses extra-pictorial means, mirrors, wires, wood objects found lying about but also enriches the visual paraphernalia of the artist with his efficacious use of enamels and industrial resins, adapting these chromatic resources to the need to conquer extreme degrees of transparency and luminosity. And while works such as "Oltre il Sogno" [Beyond the Dream] from 2001, "Ritmica" [Rhythmic] and "Sognare di Nuovo" [Dream Again] from 2002 confirm the debt that the artist agrees he owes to Fontana, with the later acrylics the severance from the experiences of the admired model who in any case remains unequalled will be shown to be net and definitive. In any case, in his own way Chinese distances himself from every objective excess in the material relief, form the plastic redundancy of the medium, even where virtually translated, in the case of Fontana, into a radical conceptualisation, aiming vice versa to deploy his specialist vision within the same pictorial phenomenology. He essentially tries to figure an architecture of colour through a movement of progressive tone-colour undulations, of vectorial bands that furrow the latitudes of the picture, radiating in curvilinear projections along the edges, thus producing gravitational tensions from one extremity to another, as we can see in "Evento Spaziale 5" [Spatial Event 5] from last year.
We must therefore register at least two stylistic methods that substantially contribute to the shaping his process of abstraction, characterised by a dominant chromatic manifestation, from a pervasive, effusive colour-light, that expands and overflows in parabolic or elliptical movements in space, twisting or spreading in successive twirls around a gestational formal nucleus, original cell of a luminous proliferating emanation, the other instead is marked by the preference for homogeneous colour, uniform or just vibrated on the same tonal register, light or dark on which the artist prepares to act with abutting elements, materials ?found? revived with allusive calculation and with different functions, equally emblematically surprising.
In fact, Chinese's action is now directed towards a dimension that tends to overcome the merely illusionary condition of the pictorial surface, consequently aspiring to expose itself to the outside, to leave the borders of the picture, to become concrete experience of the real space, reaching a physical morphology, a volumetric consistency that preludes to a constructive plasticity, inducing the relative geometric structures to flex according to a totalising chromatic dynamism. This research is then collocated, beyond the chilly objectivity that more properly belongs to the sphere of the conceptual, similarly distinguishing itself from the excited and visceral materialism of the post-informals, proposing on the contrary, a sometimes sensuous unfolding, perceptibly corporeal, at times ideal, fantastically imagined, alternating in logic relation accents and means with which the artist every time manages to orchestrate and modulate the enigmatic luminous theorems of his spatial theorems.
He realises, in effect, a concerted association between Cartesian spirit "conceptual and geometric rigour" and imaginative freedom "purely lyrical expressivity" combining these faculties in a process of synthesis, in a formal reduction of admirable simplification, leaving nothing to chance, but returning every element of the compositive syntax to the reasons of an interior order, to the need for a deeper harmony where the mystery of creation truly rings out. Something originally sonorous surfaces from the rhythms of his sidereal architectures, something that transcends the matter of the merely visual and that goes beyond the presumed absoluteness of perception and depiction, thus indicating other places to listen in order to capture and transmit a sense of the obscure, perhaps what animates and what can animate new worlds of nature and imagination.
For Chinese the movement of the forms is identified with secret musical cadences, he poetically intuits the structural articulations that he then translates into chromatic sequences, in splendid linear developments, in volumes of air and light, in crystalline phosphorescent reflections: projectual magics that can only be born of the instances, irresistibly utopic, of a desire to show beauty in itself and for itself.
The work of the artist will therefore focalise in the latter years around these themes of the need to visualise, as far as possible, the secret natural symphony that inhabits the universe, allusively configuring sinuous trajectories of spatial forces, revealing unusual luminous events, instituting refined scales of tones and timbres, in an ever fluid and dynamic equilibrium, always in the elementary constructive scanning of the geometric weaves that regulate and plastically weld it to the structural framework or, rather the icastic architecture of the image. However, Chinese is careful not to yield to suggestions of semi-scientific story-weaving or to allow himself to be carried away by the perils of a magmatic dreamlike impulse. On the contrary, he analyses and meditates with coherence and rigour on the possible, if improbable, formal analogies between objectified revelations by experimental physics and foreboding explorations of the artistic imagination. On these traces then he leads his expressive soundings, hazarding personal paths of investigation through the polyform matter with which the various "reliefs" are composed, the variegated constellations of his chromatic urographs, the topological diagrams and the mercurial liveliness of an ever-artificial spatial construction although motivated by a singular cosmo-luminological formulation.
In fact, little relates it to Spatialism although he believes that he recalls it every time he deals with the problem of the dimensions of the beyond, of the digression from the flat surface with the aim of withdrawing from illusionism "more or less apparent" of pictorial plasticism, to access the unstable perspectives of the real flows. Nonetheless, his creative experience tends to identify itself, not only symbolically, with a process of visionary transfiguration that also incorporates the reality of the physical space. The operation that the artist intends to conduct effectively aims to define a geometry of the mind, to return to the perception of things and nature the statute of an interior order, of a rationality, however non-abstract, but accomplished with the lucid consciousness of aspiring to hear with reflected poetic intensity the harmony of the "higher spheres", in a space not only symbolic and not even in an insuperable transcendence, but in the places and in the concrete moments of an existential and imaginative adventure, both necessarily driven to converge in the same reverberating dimension of the here and elsewhere, of the commensurable and the inexplicable, of the contingent and the totality. The imaginative vis of these cosmological maps by Chinese, the traces of a formative genesis of possible universes for significant conceptual schemes, summaries of a figuration for which states of mind, secret moods, profound emotions count above all, leap forcefully forth without any references lent from the external world and from unnatural surrealism, either of a conceptual or of a dreamlike quality.
A decisive change in the search for a language of the individual formal purity, although contaminated by pictorial and extra-pictorial materials, between the diaphanous transparencies of the flowing stratums of colour and the dense layers of mineral consistency, between surface and relief, between bidimensionality and tridimensionality, with which the artist engages a dialectic confrontation, but of essential expressive vitality, since he tends with this to dismantle the conventions of these opposing categories of representation, convinced that the space of the artistic reality must in any case remain the product of an effective invention of image, i.e. it must give form to the original idea.
The principal intent of the artist, therefore, consists of showing that continual and continually diverse passage between the perception of the external of the objectivity and the interior reflection, a movement that his work inscribes in the determination of a specular process of image. Perhaps this is why he cannot fully share the conceptual radicalism of Fontana, but also avoids allowing himself to be enwrapped in the objectualism of "environmental" art, by the omnivorous installative strategies proposed by the aesthetics of a new and overflowing diction of "realism" in a key of ostentatiously mimetic exercise on the side of bio-anthropology and prevalently playful and functionally spectacular pasting. Chinese on the other hand follows with constant faithfulness the parabola of his imaginative investment in the inexhaustible resources of painting, composed primarily of a daydream experience and of the cultural stimuli most congenial to him, unfolding a necessitated process of stylistic investigation such as to lead him to renew the syntactic trim and the material instruments of the current formulations. Almost a new beginning that he initiated with the works of the last five years, from the second edition of "Sognare di Nuovo" [Dream Again] from 2000 (a painting-collage composed of crooked geometric projections and a piece of glass at the top, in the centre and diagonally traversed by a red wooden rod) to the praised spatial kinetic of "In direzione dell'equilibrio" [In the Direction of Equilibrium], from 2004, to "Elicoide Cosmico2 [Cosmic Helicoid], from the following year, displayed at his personal exhibition in Barcelona and "Oscillazioni Gravitazionali" [Gravitational Oscillations] from the end of 2006, culminating in the synthesis of the visionary elements of a spatial hyperuranus of colour and light.
On the often teeming need of these formal and thematic variations, he concentrates the consequence of the cosmological iconography not only on the plane, now, of the symbolic references, although unconnected to the stereotypes of the heirs of Spatialism, but alien also from the dark spells of an enduring informal surrealism. Also the new images are focused derivations of the complex historical climate of abstractism, born of the same ideological womb, conjugated in the manner of a visual pronouncement that parallelly draws on a personal reverie, cultivated with obstinate firmness, precisely because it supplied the artist with the archetypes of a more emblematically cosmological figuration, to the point where it involves the openly objectual establishment of modern plastic constructions.
Chinese placed before the intersection of an equally clamorous exit from the painting attempts to circumvent the obstacle, preferring to aggregate in a non-aleatory combination of heterogeneous materials, to be used for the reasons and the meanings of the pictorial conceptualisation of a project of a figurative elaboration that in painting finds its true raison d'être, that which mysteriously surged from possible worlds of visions that could not otherwise manifest themselves.
Chinese?s visions reverberate then in movements of imaginary astral bodies, figuring deviant rotations, perspective links and chromatic brilliance, scores newly opened at looming meanings, on fragrant sonority that equally belongs to the magic of painting. But above all, they cross the canvases and the boards of the colours of his land ? now gentle, almost evanescent, now bright, strongly marked ? paintings that seem to flaunt the signs inflicted by the artist, powerful allusions to the insidious karstic slashes, and that show the sudden breaks in the plane and the extraneous superstructures, contaminations of hybrid physicality, disoriented assemblies, sharpness and suavity, contrasting plastic grafts and flowing lyrical surges. Although in the varied stylistic tangency and the noticeable loans from known examples of artistic experimentation from recent years, methods and accents that should be carefully highlighted in the progressive development of Chinese?s work, it is above all important to indicate the effective range of the qualities personally expressed in his work, of the propositions he introduces in the direction of a sharp sensibility and a critical awareness of the values of modernity. |
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