Gino Gandini - Reggio

The urban landscape was already a popular subject in the Middle Ages and the Modern Era, but predominantly in an idealized manner. Scenes of city life became typical themes with a more realistic interpretation starting in the 19th century. It's worth remembering how, immediately following the realist movements of the 19th century, the Impressionists also placed great emphasis on the everyday, on everyday life, with a certain predilection, however, for the frenetic pace of the city, its crowds, traffic, and typically bourgeois settings. In Gino Gandini's paintings, reality always takes on a subdued and minimal aspect; in this sense, the urban scenes that appear in his works refer to a dimension suited to this type of language. For this reason, his favorite subjects are views of industrial suburbs or glimpses of small towns.

Artist Gino Gandini's vision of reality always takes a minimalist approach. The artist's aim is to reduce the subject to its bare essentials to connect with its most significant and poetic essence. This lithograph is a beautiful example of this aesthetic embraced by the Reggio Emilia artist, especially since Gandini's graphic work allows him to develop an even more succinct and linear language. The space of this urban view is delineated through the subtle and elegant graphic signs representing the railroad tracks, while a solitary locomotive moves like a shadow, puffing out a puff of steam. In the predominantly white palette, the buildings in the background appear as geometric shapes. Formally, the hatching is extraordinary in modulating the grayscale and lending varying depth and light to the elements that appear in the distance. Everything fits within the definition of a pared-down landscape, yet, for this very reason, highly lyrical and existential.

Gino Gandini was an artist originally from Reggio Emilia, born in 1912 and died in 2001. In 1928, he enrolled at the Gaetano Chierici School of Drawing, where he met Ottorino Davoli, who would become his longtime friend and advisor. He then completed his training at the Venturi Art Institute in Modena and, from 1938, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, where Giorgio Morandi taught engraving. By the 1930s, he was already an excellent draftsman and talented painter. His predilection, in those years, was for figures, while landscapes and still lifes would become his mature genres. His work explored themes of solitude and existential melancholy, which would become his most original and significant stylistic signature.

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