IO CAMUNO
I define myself a Camuno painter. My valley isolation, due to geographical reasons, has on the one hand favoured a heaping of silence and wisdom, but on the other it hasn't hindered a series of contacts at different levels: human, cultural and artistic ones.


All this has been of great advantage for my artistic sensibility and language. I gave birth to a way of painting which is the result of a slow ripening through time. My painting is not traditional in the usual meaning we give to the term, but it lives in modern sensibility and is therefore free to be accepted.
It is the image of a reality that owns the strength of being brushed down. It is the colour that lives in the environment-atmosphere of everything around me: the sky, the mountains, the lake, the life of the lake, where colours and brush strokes nourish themselves with flashes of impression. These feelings are then revived in the silence of my studio. They are mediated with the knowledge of pictorial culture and quickly conveyed to avoid idea-images that could compromise what I am creating.
Pictorial culture surely exists in the working moment, but it doesn't prevent me to spontaneously draw from my inner simplicity. This simplicity involves my emotivity at the same time. Colours take part both in the seen image and in the emotion evoked by the image.
The colouristic progress of masses in my paintings could bring to a sort of technical doing worked out on the surface. On the contrary, the spectator is reminded of deeper needs.
This disposition of mine allows me to be always open-eyed and aware of the surrounding reality.

(primavera 1984)                                                     Giuseppe Piovaneli
 
AMONG GLARES OF LIGHTS AND COLOURS

Giuseppe Piovanelli, born in 1945, lives in Gratacasolo, a small village you come across just after Pisogne at your very first encounters with Camonica valley. Between the last blue plates of Sebino lake and the green of Camune lands this artist has been inventing his painting for years, on the boards where inside and outside worlds go on crossing themselves without ever becoming a definite part of each other.
With a good cultural and technical background, due to his arts exams and attendance of "Brera Academy of Fine Arts", this peculiar character of Brescia art is used to work with brush strokes, which are almost glares of red, blue, yellow, green and other tones, intended not to build hardened forms but rather the very soul or flame of the landscape, of this land he feels himself irreparably tied up to. Simplicity of image and emotion, evoked by the same images, are the terms in which Piovanelli sums up the kernel of his experience.
It is a warm painting which is not afraid of revealing itself as such, being so happy as capering about with joy.
We have to realize that Piovanelli is neither a shy artist, nor someone who plays kill or cure. He is certainly aware of the fact that art is a language to be mastered, but he doesn't linger behind sad impressionisms or vice versa straight plunges into quick cracks.
He says of himself that he has become imbued with everything around him: sky, mountains, waters, vivacity of places. He later resumes in the silence of his studio what he has previously absorbed, refashioning the whole in a golden thread of a sort of cocoon which belongs to him only. His compositions are incredibly given birth in this way. They are identifiable at once for the genuine quality of their colours and their bursting into the act of painting. Inside them, there is the ardour of a fantasy exited by lights and chromatic notes, a fantasy which is nevertheless able to keep anchored to what everyday events offer both with their intensity and bitterness.
This is one, and not the smallest one, among Giuseppe Piovanelli's qualities: to celebrate life for what actually it goes on to be.

June 1984                                                                                                                                               Luciano Spiazzi