Guccione, Piero - Recent Paintings and Drawings (James Goodman Gallery) (1989)

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DENVER PUBL C LIBRARY

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PIERO

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Recent Paintings and Drawings

Essay by Michael Peppiatt

May 18 to June 9, 1989

gallery

41 East 57 Street, 8th floor

New York, NY 10022

Telephone (212) 593-3737

Telefax (212) 980-0195

© 1989 James Goodman Gallery

In cooperation with Galleria II Gabbiano, Rome

Photography: Eddie Watklns, NY and Alfio Di Bella, Rome

Artists portrait: Giorgio Soavi

Design: Marcus Ratliff, Inc.

Typesetting: Maxwell Typographers

Printing: Thorner Sidhe^r Press

I AM DELIGHTED to present, in coopera-

tion with Galleria II Gabbiano of Rome, the

recent paintings and drawings of the Italian

artist, Piero Guccione. I was introduced to his

work several years ago by my close friend and

associate. Sandro Manzo. The soft and lyrical

quality of the work made an impression on me

at that time, and continues to do so.

Guccione has been painting since the

late 50s, and in recent years has concentrated

on the environs of his native Sicily and the

Mediterranean. He is a meticulous painter and

draughtsman, constantly working and rework-

ing in an attempt to capture the essence of his

surroundings— the sun, the earth, the sea, and

the sky. In my mind, with these later works, he

succeeds masterfully.

My thanks are due all of those who made

this exhibition possible—the artist, Michael

Peppiatt for his essay, Galleria II Gabbiano in

Rome, my staff at the James Goodman Gallery,

and most particularly to Mr. Manzo, for his

remarkable vision and unstinting efforts on

Mr. Guccione's behalf.

James Neil Goodman

DENVERPUBLIC LIBRARY

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Piero Guccione

THEWORLD IS circumscribed by places

where a world ends. Scicli, on the south-

ernmost coast of Sicily, is a town where a

civilization reaching back to the Greeks comes

abruptly to an end. On that scorched outpost

overlooking the Mediterranean towards the

Libyan shore, Piero Guccione lives his isolated

artists existence like the last exemplar of a

great abandoned culture.

An exile in time, Guccione continues to

pursue the ideal of beauty that transfixed his

classical forebears: how to give durable form to

the floating, formless grandeur of the world?

What shape should those greatest gods, Zeus

and Poseidon, the sea and the sky, assume?

The poignancy of Guccione s task is that he

pursues what can never be caught: the shifting

dazzle of light on the water, the sky's imper-

ceptibly changing play of depth and shade.

In his own country, Piero Guccione has

become a legend, publicly praised by the

country's leading writers but almost never

seen. Cut off from the world in his Sicilian

studio, he spends months, sometimes years,

on a single image, obsessively reworking the

precise subtleties of its tones until, he feels, it

has captured the essence of the arid mountains

and glittering Mediterranean that make up

the boundaries of his world. Only then will he

allow it to join the works patiently assembled

for one of his rare exhibitions in Rome, Paris

or New York.

Although born in Sicily (in 1935), Guccione

has spent most of his adult life in Rome, where

he first studied, and later taught, at the Acad-

emy of Fine Arts. His work, as he himself des-

cribes it, has traced a complete "arc", leading

from the highly gestural painting of his twen-

ties to the painstaking realism of his maturity.

This development proved so all-consuming that

life in the city became a hindrance. Some ten

years ago. with the eagerness and relief he had

felt on leaving it as a young man, Guccione

went back to Sicily in search of the space and

the light, as well as the time, that would serve

his exacting vision best.

Guccione eventually settled for an austere

country house surrounded by a walled garden,

beyond which sparse fields end abruptly at

a horizon of sea and sky. Those two vast, end-

lessly changing and by their very nature inde-

finable elements are exactly what Guccione

longs to define in paint.

"That's probably why 1 take so long over a

painting," the artist admits. "The sea is never

the same from one instant to the next. 1 look at

it all the time. When I'm painting, all sorts of

different viewpoints, and movements of light

come back to me. 1 think it's the final sum of

these that after months of changing the whole

image, makes me think I might have caught

something of the subject's inner reality. For me,

a painting is finished only when I'm convinced

there's nothing more 1 can add or take away."

Each infinitesimal change of colour that

Guccione brings to one of his marines or

landscapes or night skies enforces a delicate,

painstaking revision of the picture's overall

tonal harmony. In changing one note, he is

obliged to change the whole. This maddening

qviest is undertaken with grace and good

humour by Guccione, whose gentle manner

belies the iron will that enforces such unswerv-

ing application. "1 need to stay on a subject for

years to find its underlying meaning," he says.

"To my mind, it's when the real and the ideal

come together that you get a compelling image."

When Guccione stares out of his window

at the endlessly changing sea and sky, he is

indeed gazing straight at North Africa. After a

long drought, with the lean cattle huddled for

shade under the carob trees, this dusty coast-

line seems more than ever the last reminder of

Europe. To see it first in the flesh and then

recreated on Guccione's canvas is to be made

acutely aware of the transformation brought

about by the artist's incessant raids on reality.

A great intensity, a stronger, more timeless

presence comes through; this is the sea, the

shore and the night sky that both Norman

invader and Greek sailor knew.

But Guccione's painting is also an art

created and nourished out of art. However close

his vision appears to come to topographical

fact, it draws constantly on a highly informed

visual culture. "There is no end to the number

of artists one admires," Guccione says, "but

Cezanne is the most essential point of refer-

ence. There's Munch, too, who in a certain way

represents the other 'face' of Cezanne." The

influence of Caspar David Friedrich has been

directly acknowledged in a series of pastels

devoted to themes borrowed from the great Ger-

man Romantic. In his recent series of drawings

of Matisse and his model, the homage to the

French master's calm— that precious lull before

the full storm of 20th-century modernism—

is evident.

"The sea occupies a space, the wind creates

a space," says Guccione. "What interests me is

to try to give durable form to those spaces, to

recreate them with their own inner structure."

The intricate compositions that result from this

ambition are built out of a mass of sketches and

notes that the artist makes while out walking

on the beach or surveying a chosen theme from

his window. Gradually cill extraneous detail, all

anecdote, is excluded, leaving a single main

theme, conveyed with a magical feel for the

grandeur of the natural world. "Guccione does

not paint what he sees," the Italian novelist,

Alberto Moravia, has suggested, "but what he

wants to see."

Something, certainly, which Guccione is

obliged to see with great sadness and anger is

the massive deterioration of the Sicilian coun-

tryside. Its severe beauty is scarred by cheap,

new buildings and dumps of semi-industrial

waste. A sense of abandon lies heavily on the

island, and it accounts for some of the melan-

choly that Guccione's landscapes communicate.

"1 often have the feeling that we have ruined

things beyond repair," the artist says. In recent

paintings of local scenes, Guccione has incor-

porated bits of black plastic into his paint. "It's

a kind of realism, " he remarks wryly. "There's

masses of this black plastic all over the coun-

tryside. It has, quite literally, become part of

the landscape.

"

Periodically, to escape the long-term labour

that each new oil painting imposes, Guccione

concentrates on pastel. The change of medium

frees him and, since he masters it so naturally,

allows him to catch a more instantaneous side

of the reality— the infinitely changing face of

Nature—which obsesses him. Sooner or later,

however seductive the soft, grainy touch of

pastel proves to be, he will return to oil. It is in

this richly, unexpectedly changing substance

that he best achieves the illusion of having

stopped the universe for an enduring second

before our eyes.

Michael Peppiatt, 1989

1 Mare di Luglio. 1985/87

2 Fine dell'estate, 1988

3 Ombre suglilblei, 1985/88

4 Mareverticale, 1985/87

I

10 Grande cielo sugli Iblei, 1988

I

13 Matisse e la modella, 1989

M'^v^


Checklist

1 Mare di Luglio, 1985/87

oil on canvas

33 X 43 inches (84 x 109 cm)

2 Finedell'estate, 1988

oil on canvas with collage (plastic)

59 X 36 inches ( 150 x 91.5 cm)

3 Ombre suglilblei, 1985/88

oil on canvas

33 X 43 inches (84 x 109 cm)

4 Mareverticale, 1985/87

oil on canvas

42 1/8 X 31% inches ( 107 x 81 cm)

5 Vita e morte deWibiscus, 1984/89

mixed media with oil and collage

191 Vi 6 X 255/8 inches (50 x 65 cm)

6 Notte. 1985/89

oil on canvas

42 1/2 X 29 1/8 inches ( 108 x 74 cm)

7 Lajinedell'estate (mare). 1987/89

oil on canvas

29 Vex 421/2 inches (74 x 108 cm)

8 Campagnalblea, 1985/89

oil on canvas

33 X 42 V2 inches (84 x 108 cm)

9 Grande spiaggia, 1988/89

oil on canvas

59 X 383/16 inches ( 150 x 97 cm)

10 Grande cielo sugli Iblei, 1988

oil on canvas

18V8X 451/4 inches (46 X 115 cm)

11 Spiaggia, 1989

oil on canvas

235/8 X 215/8 inches (60 x 55 cm)

12 Dopo il tramonto. 1985/87

oil on canvas

33 X 42 1/2 inches (84 X 108 cm

)


charcoal on paper

195/8 X 25 1/2 inches (50 x 65 cm)


charcoal on paper

195/8 X 25 1/2 inches (50 x 65 cm)

15 Matisse e Za modeZZa, 1989

pastel on paper

195/8 x 25 1/2 inches (50 x 65 cm)


pastel on paper

195/8 X 25 1/2 inches (50 x 65 cm)


pastel on paper

195/8 X 251/2 inches (50 x 65 cm)


pastel on paper

195/8 X 25 1/2 inches (50 x 65 cm)


pastel on paper

195/8 X 25 1/2 inches (50 x 65 cm)

Piero Guccione

Piero Guccione was born in Scicli, in the province of

Ragusa, on May 5, 1935. He studied at the Catania

Art Institute and at the Academy of Fine Arts in

Rome, where he moved in October 1954.

From 1959 until 1969, he took part in paleoethno-

logical missions to the Libyan Sahara, with architect

Fabrizio Mori's team, to make a survey of the rock

paintings.

In 1961 , at the request of the American Federation of

Art, he organized an exhibition of these paintings at

New York's Columbia University. He had his first one-

man show in Rome at the Elmo Gallery in 1960.

From 1966 until 1973, he taught at the Academy of

Fine Arts and at the First Liceo Artistico of Rome. In

1979 he held the Chair of Painting in the Catania Fine

Arts Academy.

In 1979 he went back to live in Sicily.

Selected Public Collections

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY

Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, LA

Museo d'Arte Moderna, Bologna, Italy

Museo Civico di Salo, Italy

Fondation Veranneman, Brussels, Belgium

Dow Jones and Co. , Inc. , USA

EniChem Americas, NY

AGIP Americas, NY

ITALTEL. Milan, Italy

Olivetti, Ivrea, Italy

Banco di Sicilia, Palermo, Italy

Selected One-Man Exhibitions

1968

II Gabbiano, Rome, Italy

1970

Fornl, Bologna, Italy


1971

Palazzo del Diamanti, museum retrospective, Ferrara,

Italy


1972

Bergamini, Milan, Italy

1974


1975

Durer, Bologna, Italy

Arteoggi, Messina, Italy

1976

Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris, France


Sellerio, Palermo, Italy

1978

Bottego d'Arte, Acqui Terme, Italy

1979

Galleria Bambaia, Busto Arslzio, Italy

San Marco dei Giustiniani, Genova, Itcdy


FLAG, Paris Art Fair, II Gabbiano

1980

Odyssia, New York

1981

Arte al Borgo. Pcilermo, Italy


Gcilleria Bambaia, Busto Arsizio, Italy

La Vite, Catania, Italy

1983

Spatia, Bolzano, Italy

Galeria Claude Bernard, Paris, France

II Modula, Francavilla, Italy

Comune di Paterno, Antologta di grajxca, Italy

Galleria Giulia, Antologia di grqfica, Rome, Italy

1984

II Gabbiano, Omaggio a Friedrich, Rome, Italy

Bergamini, Omaggia a Friedrich. Milan, Italy

Forni, Omaggia a Friedrich, Bologna, Italy

Chicago International Art Exposition, II Gabbiano

Galleria Bambaia, Busto Arsizio, Italy

Stamparte, Grcifica, Bologna, Italy

1985

Art 16 Basilea, II Gabbiano, Rome, Italy

The Mezzanine Gallery, The Metropolitan Museum

of Art, NY

L'Androne. Antologia di grcifica, Scicli, Italy

1986

Palazzo Dugnani, Dopo il vento d'occidente, Milan,

Italy

II Gabbiano, Dopo il vento d'occidente, Rome, Italy

Chicago Internationed Art Exposition, II Gabbiano

II Segno, Mostra retrospetttva 1960/1970, Catania,

Italy

1987

II Gabbiano, Tridente due: Senso, Rome, Italy

Galleria A. Boito, Senso, Belluno, Italy

1988

Art at the Armory, NY, II Gabbiano

Galerie Claude Bernard, Pastels, Paris, France

La Senseverina, Guccione 1983-1987, Parma, Italy

Chicago International Art Exposition, II Gabbiano

Galleria dei Greci, Rome, Italy

Galleria Bambaia, Busto Arsizio, Italy

1989

Galleria Bergamini, Milan

James Goodman Gallery. New York

Selected Group Exhibitions

1962

Fiorino Prize at Florence, Italy

Disegni italiani moderni. curator Giovanni

Carandente at Spoleto and Ivrea, Italy

1966

32nd Biennale di Venezia, Italy

Biennale di Parigi at Paris. France

Prize for Painting at Lido Azzurro, Torre Annunziata,

Italy

1968

Prize at Capo d'Orlando

1970

Attraverso iimmaginazione. curator Enzo Siciliano

at II Gabbiano, Rome, Italy

Dealer's Choice American Academy at Rome, Italy

1971

Aspetti della nuovejigurazione. 1960/68 at Palazzo

Reale, Naples, Italy

1972

35th Biennale di Venezia, Italy

10th Quadriennale di Roma, Italy

1975

Fondation Veranneman, Brussels, Belgium

1976

5th Biennale internazionale della grafica at Florence,

Italy

1977

Arte in Italia 1960/77, Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna

(museum show), Torino, Italy

Pittura italiana 1950/70, curator F. Bellonzi, travelled

in Europe

1978


1979

Nouvelle subjectivetee. curator Jean Clair at Palais

des Beaux Arts (museum show), Brussels, Belgium

Le pastel at Chateau d'Ancy, Le Franc, France

10 pittori italiani d'oggi. curator Guido Giuffre and

Richard Piccolo

1981

Arte e critica at Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Rome and

Marshall Field, Chicago

1982


1984

L'immagine e il suo doppio. curator F. De Santis at

Palazzo Bagatti-Valsecchi, Milan and Galleria

Rondanini, Rome, Italy

Drawings 1974/84, curator Frank Gettings at the

Hirshhorn Museum, Washington

1985

Artisti e scrittori at Rotonda della Besana, Milan

1986

Paesaggio senza territorio, curator Vittorio Sgarbi at

Castello di Mesola, Ferrara

1987

5th Triennale delllncisione at Palazzo della

Permanente, Milan

Lo Spazio del silenzio, curator Vittorio Sgarbi at

Fiero di Milano

Maestri siciliani del XX secolo. curator Maurizio

Calvesi at Galleria Civica, Enna

Disegno italiano del dopoguerra at Galleria Civica,

Modena

La natura morta neliarte italiana del Novecento,

curator Vittorio Sgarbi at Castello Estense, Mesola

and Pinacoteca Provinciale, Bari

\]

Documents

Guccione, Piero - Recent Paintings and Drawings (James Goodman Gallery) (1989)