Detail - Antonio Pedretti

He was born on February 2, 1950, in Gavirate, in the province of Varese. He trained first at the Sforza Castle painting school and then at the Brera Academy, which he left in 1972. Meanwhile, at the age of sixteen, he had already held his first solo exhibition at the Galleria Ca' Vegia in Varese, with palette knife paintings depicting landscapes, farmhouses, flowers, trees, and stagnant water, with a certain sentimentality and remarkable, precocious technical skill.

This latter subject will remain a constant in the artist's career, born on the shores of the lake and therefore intimately linked to this type of natural landscape.

After participating in several group exhibitions, including the Premio Nazionale Varese Arte, in 1970 he commissioned a second solo show at the Galleria Ghiggini in Varese, showcasing several nudes reminiscent of the delicate gestures of De Pisis or Bonnard, and a series of landscapes dedicated to Sicily. Gian Franco Maffina wrote in the catalogue: "Still with his eyes filled with the moist tenderness of this Lombard land, he must have been astonished by the violent beauty of our South, by the blinding light of its walls parched by a relentless sun and the saltiness of the sea, by its dazzling beaches, by its sea rippled by the hot African wind. One can sense his almost stunned agitation in these coastal villages where the silence is broken only by the clatter of a donkey or the oriental-like call of a street vendor." Two years later, he exhibited at the Galerie L'Angle aigu in Brussels, achieving flattering critical acclaim in the Belgian press. Renato Guttuso introduces him: "Dear Pedretti, although you are very young, your work already offers some solid evidence for judging your uncommon talents. One cannot help but be struck by the confidence with which your lines, your touches of color, define a landscape, a figure, a whole in its essential features; by the ability with which your drawing penetrates form, investigating it with precision, without falling into meticulously academic analysis. Today your work is at a very serious stage, and it seems to me that your recent paintings contain new elements compared to the happiness and ease of your earlier works. There is an awareness of a new commitment and new difficulties. It is the premise of a leap forward."

At this point, after a summary exhibition at the Ghiggini Gallery, the artist began a period of reflection, a period of reconsideration during which he withdrew from public activity for a silent and thoughtful research project, reviewing his artistic experiences thus far and questioning them.

The first results of this secluded experimental phase were a series of imaginary landscapes composed solely of sea waves and drifting clouds, captured in suspended atmospheres bathed in vivid light. It is the gesture, in the manner of Pollock, that takes on importance in these works from the second half of the 1970s, a broad and expansive gesture that allows the pictorial material to expand and wrinkle, to shine in vivid colors and to create allusive textures. He painted these "informal" images on sheets of PVC or Plexiglas and enclosed them within them, layering the materials and even using resins. Viana Conti, in her presentation of the exhibition Ceneri a Resistenza, held in 1982 at the Luogo di Gauss in Milan, saw these choices as a starting point: "The painter, after having unleashed himself on large scales and having demonstrated his ability to invade the world, reweaves a space of play and analysis and begins to speak again behind a veil. The threshold beyond which he repeats his pictorial gestures is the transparency of a sheet of plexiglass. But that sheet is there to create distance, to function as a window, a focal point of the gaze. The artist's freedom, in his recent works, is not sought in the maximum extension of his arms, in a full-throated scream, but in a succession of small gestures and modulations of the voice. The thought of limits, which previously seemed distressing, becomes practicable again for this artist, if not even a condition for the continuity of the artistic discourse. The idea of ​​the fragment, freeing itself of a ruinous connotation, recreates a starting point for the construction no longer of a monument to the past, but of a document of the present.

In Pedretti's work, a memory of informal origin can be recovered, which over time has been emptied of meanings and values, finding in the frequentation of matter and colors... magical and playful impulses.

For Marco Meneguzzo, however, with these works the artist places himself on the boundary beyond which painting invades other territories: "There is no doubt that Pedretti's painting is landscape painting—and how much he owes to a certain Lombard naturalism is certainly not hidden; the surprising fact today is rather that this landscape aims to be a natural landscape and not, once again, an artistic landscape. It is therefore not his 'Mannerist' operation, however much one can escape Mannerism today—which derives its raison d'être only from art. A risky position to maintain, but a bold and, paradoxically, novel one: as if a positive confidence in oneself and in the means of painting could have the subversive power to overturn tendencies and directions, which indeed show some signs of fatigue, but which still seem to have no alternative." Not a traversal of images and art history, not an analysis and torment of painting's ultimate tools, but a reference both ancient and new, an attempt to revitalize and reconnect threads that may not have been completely severed within a certain tradition, especially a Romantic one. The transparencies that Pedretti achieves through repeated pours of resin and paint are transparencies that can even recall Tiepolo's skies, but also a Lombard sky 'so beautiful when it's beautiful'. Another naturalism? The question is as old as painting itself...' (introduction to the catalogue of the solo exhibition at Luogo di Gauss, Milan, 1983).

And in fact the question of naturalism is central in Pedretti, as his further work demonstrates.

In fact, having abandoned, starting from the mid-1980s, the ambitions of the contemporary avant-gardes, he returned to a certain extent to that sense of nature of his origins, to lyrical landscape evocations, mindful however of the informal gestures and above all of the lesson of three great masters of the genre: Constable, Segantini, and Morlotti. Of the first two, we find in Pedretti's images the skillful use of chromatic scansions and the great ability to structure the whole through chiaroscuro; of the third, the earthy relationship with the material is evident, as we might say, which increasingly tends to solidify and acquire depth. These are undoubtedly merely cultural references, the solid foundations on which Pedretti's pictorial constructions rest. He relies on visual sensations, but above all, he recreates in the studio, drawing on memory, visions that have been lodged in his imagination since childhood, which surface and accumulate with each experience. And, if at first he depicted broad panoramas of lake landscapes, marsh grasses, and reed beds, now he seems to immerse himself in them, in an almost symbolic ritual, to highlight a detail, to isolate a particular, to bring into focus a stem or a flower or an entire bush.

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