Between heaven and earth by Grabriella Niero
The gesture becomes spasmodic, rapid. The colour dilates and slides freely over the surface that suddenly wrinkles and then tears itself apart. The energy is concentrated in a thick brushstroke and then explodes. It all seems to become incandescent magma. The painting quivers, breathes, lives and develops like an autonomous organism.
Gianni Piva’s painting offers itself in this way, immediately and without half measures. Warm and cold tones, mixed by an intense and sinuous brushstroke, emerge from a decisive calligraphy, communicating evocations and atmosphere that fl ow from a direct rapport with natural reality. These are the formal data that emanate from the expressivity of an author who, with an energetic temperament, miraculously fuses the impressions of experience with the echoes that emerge from within him. The painting unites the two situations, codifi es the vital force that regulates the existence of man and nature, frees the mobile profi les of colours, or rather of material, in a context that take on profound symbolic meanings.
The stylistic dimensions reveal a neo-expressionist temperament, given the purity of the brushstroke and the autonomous laying down of the colour that, depending upon the creative moment, thickens into smudges or dilates into refi ned tonalities. Everything emerges from the profundity of the soul, transfi guring emotions and sensations congealed by the use of bright shadings alternating with darker tones, light touches together with incisive signs that slide freely over the surfaces to give life to distant marine reliefs, to the earth’s crust lacerated by fi re, and traces of archaic writing, the memory of ancient cultures. The author favours the rapport among tonal contrasts, red and black drippings, white rents with black backgrounds or black on red, inserts of light given by gold-leaf on brown, the effect of combustion, collages with jute sacks and light iridescent shadings.
The eye of the observer fi xes upon a few details, on the tongues of light, on the slivers of material, on the fragments that make up the internal grain, or the essence of ground, fi re, air and water.
We suddenly become aware of the emotional reflection that emanates from the canvas. Gianni Piva’s paintings create an evocative dimension that refl ects the deep psychic dilation of the human soul, i.e. transfi guring the symbiosis between man and the environment. He shows us the lesser-known side of things, the vital energy, while the external eye miraculously adds to the internal pulsations. The sinuous forms, the superimposed rhythms, the tinged energy, the glaring lights that counterpoint the areas in shadow, transfi gure the presence of the physical tension that pervades existence for the author.
In this way the canvas takes on the quality of an “object of knowledge”, becoming the place where natural elements establish oppositions and relations, where experience of the world, living existence, dynamic vitality and energy converge in the poetic aspiration expressed by the author. In fact, everything proceeds within a simplifi ed phenomenology, eliminating every element considered accessory, reaching the defi nition of the truly perceived substance or the visual evocation that wishes to be represented. The author takes the phenomenon to its fullest original essence where, in the meantime, passions and intimate moods meet.
The artistic temperament gradually resolves itself and becomes a means of effectively expressing the variegations, cracks and fl uid masses of the communicative force of what surrounds us, together with details that stamp an autonomous and transfi gured beauty upon each single painting. The painting signals the encounter between interior pulsations and the linguistic model expressed together in a balanced dialectic between the form and its content.
Gianni Piva lives painting as a free soul, following every sensual psychic variation, turned into the leavening forms of light, decisive gestures, and the material tangibility of subjects that refl ect an authentic organic energy. His poetics become, therefore, inquiries into the intimate value of the forces that belong to the internal and external reality of things, analyses of the pulsations that control emotions and, at the same time, artistic expression. The painting communicates and stimulates increasingly new and profound feelings. Surprise is inevitable with the sensation of facing something that involves the author and the onlooker in the same way, in a process of radical change in which everything dissolves and, at the same time, amalgamates. The mystery of existence is gradually revealed and the material and the superfi cial are overcome to enter into the labyrinth of a fascinating world that rediscovers lost memories.