Domenico Chianese - Woman with a Bowl

Social themes in art began to gain prominence in the mid-19th century, coinciding with the spread of social questions throughout European societies. The work of painters such as Millet and Daumier, for example, favored subjects related to life in the fields, factory work, or strikes. In Italy, among the first painters to engage deeply with social themes were Pellizza da Volpedo and, in the contemporary era, Renato Guttuso. Domenico Chianese also falls into this category, and his favorite subjects are farmers and figures of working-class background, depicted through his original and personal artistic language, which combines contemporaneity with an authentic and sincere description of a typical Campanian reality.

Domenico Chianese's stylistic language appears fundamentally expressionist, in the sense of a general synthesis of subjects and compositions aimed at transcending a specific representation towards profound symbolic meanings. For this reason, Domenico Chianese's expressionism is characterized by a rapid, darting stroke that quickly delineates figures, but takes on, especially in the application of color, a deliberately rough, earthy, almost dirty quality. In this way, the artist achieves a representation of social reality strongly linked to the everyday life and concreteness of his subjects, in an artistic process that is simultaneously symbolic and realistic. All this takes shape in a dynamic painting style, in which a material density combines with a distinctively earthy tonalism. At times, this synthesis leads to swells in the forms or makes them statuesque, imbued with an archaic strength derived from their truthfulness.

Domenico Chianese was a Campanian artist, born in Villaricca in 1924 and died in Marano in 2002. He can be considered one of the protagonists of social painting in the Neapolitan area. Indeed, his work is tied to popular themes, inspired by work and everyday life. In this sense, Chianese developed his own expressionist language with distinctively concrete and realistic tones.

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