Alberto Guerri - The Fishermen's House

The subject of the painting is not only explained by the illustrative title "The Fishermen's Houses," but also by the archive, which certifies the work's authenticity. The Ligurian painter often visited, along with the writer Salvator Gotta, the landscape of San Fruttuoso on the Ligurian coast. It is a small fishing village, which remains impressive for the ancient impact of its stone buildings with pointed arches and the majesty that complements a simple and humble life.

In the work under consideration, among the painter's finest works; the subject departs from the often-debated themes of imaginative, vast, panoramic architecture of Gothic-Medieval origin. Here, with this work, the artist achieves the excellence of the grotesque-Picassian decomposition of the village of San Fruttuoso di Cavoli, near Portofino and often visited by the painter in the company of the writer Gotta. Those familiar with the ancient village can easily discern a stacking, a verticalization, of portions of architectural elements that construct and conclude, in their fragmentation, the most distinctive features of the old seaside village. He sought, like the great artists, a personal interpretation of the visible, here broken down into pieces of pure architecture, here masterfully and harmoniously assembled. Form, light, and the use of monochrome in its gradations contribute to a unified impression, to the metaphysics of the landscape of San Fruttuoso suspended between natural reality and abstraction, between realism and poetic surrealism with cubist impulses.

Alberto Guerri, at a very young age, revealed, through an exquisitely spiritual nature, multiple artistic talents. These talents led him, among his many interests (drawing, engraving, woodcutting), to devote himself with particular enthusiasm to music, which he soon abandoned. This is an important milestone in Guerri's history and individuality, which deserves further exploration and study. In his later years, Guerri, through his own intuitions and reflections, arrived at a painting style in the vein of the primitives: Giotto and Masaccio. Guerri frankly, and even with pleasure, admitted that his Portofino architecture tended toward Giotto's constructions, reinterpreted in a modernist vein. His adherence to Giotto was equivalent to his adherence to a pictorial language that, in what was called the early Renaissance, became the ultimate paragon of firmness and plastic simplicity. Faithful to these principles, Guerri, in times of heated artistic conflict, never allows himself to be attracted by pre-established mental or graphic formulas. "Alberto Guerri is a painter with a lively and personal temperament, self-taught, creator of an absolutely original genre, between realism and fantasy, an obsession with panoramic beauty and the joy of detail, a colourist in his own way, of an almost childlike simplicity and a primitive strength" (Salvator Gotta, 1970)

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