ENRICO
ENRICO CAMPIOLI "PLAYS" WITH PAINTING
Enrico Campioli is a big boy. This definition is very apt to understand his personality, his look, and, most of all, his art. Enrico in fact is like a playful child, always ready to witty remarks and hilarious jokes. He is sociable, friendly to everyone, outgoing and a little bit innocent. His looks like a very intelligent and impertinent enfant prodige on his first school day; wearing out-of-fashion big glasses and with his short black hair growing with incredible vigour and parted on one side. He always loves to wear colored papillon, which he changes very often, as if it was an exercise of style, since he collects them with eagerness. He is a '68 "conscript", he has got a beautiful wife and two lovely children with whom he often competes. Yes, because the "big baby", one meter and eighty centimeters tall, is the father of Fabiola, 12 years, and Mattia, 4 years. The enfant prodige has also a respectable job as employee at one of the historic libraries of his town. The description above gives a wonderful picture, but also things which show their bright side, always have a dark side too. Enrico in fact has an "insane passion", or maybe it is better to say an obsession... : painting!
There is no mistake to state that to Enrico painting is a relieving and playful act, without beating about the bush, truly direct, as if his interior world was thrown outside and been revealed. As children have the desire and the need to express themselves through playing, so Enrico plays at being a painter, to satisfy his will to express himself and communicate with others. Both of them don't take reality as a reference. If we had to ascribe his painting to one of last century artistic movements, we should go back to the twenties, to Surrealism and consider psychic automatism, according to which unconscious impulses are processed into simple strokes, always with a joyful source; like, for instance, Matta's works, with his automatic writing, or Mirņ's paintings, which show his magic and simplified poetic vision of reality. Psychic automatism has the aim to display how human mind works, beyond any conscious control, and it has no ambition to represent reality in a mimetic way; Enrico , expresses it through the most different techniques: acrylic, pastel, etc.., just the same as Surrealism did.
The most attracting feature, in Enrico's work, are its colors: strongly vivid and bright. Some titles of his paintings evidently disclose their joyful goal; for instance "Alice", a 1996 pastel painting (owned by the artist), created for his daughter Fabiola, and which takes the viewer into a fabulous world: Wonderland. We could analyze this work as a meaningful unity; this would lead us to consider its many syntagmas, but the meaning attributed to the different syntagmatic units will doubtlessly be arbitrary. We must avoid to be conditioned by the referential illusion which would lead us to consider a painting as a simple reflection or fragment of real or imaginary world. Before considering the relation between painting and the outside world, we must examine painting's own nature. In our western culture people feel a certain receptive expectation, when they come to read a figurative pictorial work. This way to read paintings leads us to point out opposites, for example: animals against vegetables, terrestrial kingdom against celestial one, animates against inanimates, dark values against bright ones, ascending lines against descending ones. As far as "Alice" is concerned, this painting is like a closed space shaped by a harmony of colored zones, marked by waves and loops, to be considered at the same time as chromatic and linear syntagms.
It is possible to individuate two different sides, the right side and the left one, which are antithetic to one another, since they are characterized by different syntagmatic units. The right side is shaped by a big chromatic liveliness and eccentricity. Syntagms consist of sinuous lines and of the shapes they delimit. They are different in sizes, typologies and also in colors. The background is primary yellow; which is used in the same way as the gold in the Middle Age, that is, as a representation of divine light, to create a "wall", to make the perspective depth unperceivable. Sinuous lines are supposed to represent the female element, detected in its essence, by using primary colors as red, yellow and blue. The choice of the title too clearly shows that the prevailing feature is feminine. In the left side it is possible to notice a certain sobriety, created by a wide azure background, realized in a way to make pastel strokes to come out very clearly. From this background starts the only one sharp shape among a crowd of sinuous and soft lines. The main shape which characterizes this side of the painting is the cusp, meeting and crossing a female loop, colored primary blue, and fighting or matching with the male cusp, colored secondary orange, which comes from two primary colors: yellow and red. The central zone of the painting seems a prosecution of the right side.
Something of ancient and essential characterizes the work called like the mythical Minoan king: Minos, (an enamel painting, dating 1998).
It seems like Enrico stole color shades from inside Knosso and Festo houses, as the few surviving frescos let us imagine they were, before the cruel passing of time modified them. In this case the intellectual work is greater. Still loops, but here they are very dynamic and full of energy, showing a natural rhythm and an erupting joy. They are primary, archetypal shapes, created by Enrico's mind or unconsciously stolen from an ancestral memory. Also in this case, it is a writing coming from the language of the unconscious mind.
by Ilaria Azzoni
There is no mistake to state that to Enrico painting is a relieving and playful act, without beating about the bush, truly direct, as if his interior world was thrown outside and been revealed. As children have the desire and the need to express themselves through playing, so Enrico plays at being a painter, to satisfy his will to express himself and communicate with others. Both of them don't take reality as a reference. If we had to ascribe his painting to one of last century artistic movements, we should go back to the twenties, to Surrealism and consider psychic automatism, according to which unconscious impulses are processed into simple strokes, always with a joyful source; like, for instance, Matta's works, with his automatic writing, or Mirņ's paintings, which show his magic and simplified poetic vision of reality. Psychic automatism has the aim to display how human mind works, beyond any conscious control, and it has no ambition to represent reality in a mimetic way; Enrico , expresses it through the most different techniques: acrylic, pastel, etc.., just the same as Surrealism did.
The most attracting feature, in Enrico's work, are its colors: strongly vivid and bright. Some titles of his paintings evidently disclose their joyful goal; for instance "Alice", a 1996 pastel painting (owned by the artist), created for his daughter Fabiola, and which takes the viewer into a fabulous world: Wonderland. We could analyze this work as a meaningful unity; this would lead us to consider its many syntagmas, but the meaning attributed to the different syntagmatic units will doubtlessly be arbitrary. We must avoid to be conditioned by the referential illusion which would lead us to consider a painting as a simple reflection or fragment of real or imaginary world. Before considering the relation between painting and the outside world, we must examine painting's own nature. In our western culture people feel a certain receptive expectation, when they come to read a figurative pictorial work. This way to read paintings leads us to point out opposites, for example: animals against vegetables, terrestrial kingdom against celestial one, animates against inanimates, dark values against bright ones, ascending lines against descending ones. As far as "Alice" is concerned, this painting is like a closed space shaped by a harmony of colored zones, marked by waves and loops, to be considered at the same time as chromatic and linear syntagms.
It is possible to individuate two different sides, the right side and the left one, which are antithetic to one another, since they are characterized by different syntagmatic units. The right side is shaped by a big chromatic liveliness and eccentricity. Syntagms consist of sinuous lines and of the shapes they delimit. They are different in sizes, typologies and also in colors. The background is primary yellow; which is used in the same way as the gold in the Middle Age, that is, as a representation of divine light, to create a "wall", to make the perspective depth unperceivable. Sinuous lines are supposed to represent the female element, detected in its essence, by using primary colors as red, yellow and blue. The choice of the title too clearly shows that the prevailing feature is feminine. In the left side it is possible to notice a certain sobriety, created by a wide azure background, realized in a way to make pastel strokes to come out very clearly. From this background starts the only one sharp shape among a crowd of sinuous and soft lines. The main shape which characterizes this side of the painting is the cusp, meeting and crossing a female loop, colored primary blue, and fighting or matching with the male cusp, colored secondary orange, which comes from two primary colors: yellow and red. The central zone of the painting seems a prosecution of the right side.
Something of ancient and essential characterizes the work called like the mythical Minoan king: Minos, (an enamel painting, dating 1998).
It seems like Enrico stole color shades from inside Knosso and Festo houses, as the few surviving frescos let us imagine they were, before the cruel passing of time modified them. In this case the intellectual work is greater. Still loops, but here they are very dynamic and full of energy, showing a natural rhythm and an erupting joy. They are primary, archetypal shapes, created by Enrico's mind or unconsciously stolen from an ancestral memory. Also in this case, it is a writing coming from the language of the unconscious mind.