Innocent Melani - Pierrot

Since the 19th century, when painting began to explore various aspects of bourgeois life, the circus world has been a theme explored by various artists. With the development of Symbolist and Expressionist movements between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the figure of the acrobat, circus performer, or mask began to gain popularity, as it served a vital role in the development of complex iconographies with hidden and mysterious meanings. Examples include the figures of artists and harlequins immortalized by Picasso during his "blue" and "rose" periods. During the 1970s and 1980s, it became a true genre, practiced by many painters, who focused their attention primarily on the figure of the clown. In this work, Innocenzo Melani continues this trend, reclaiming the underlying and allusive magic inherent in the figure of Pierrot.

Compared to his main production, which features lithography depicting graceful female figures, this work is part of a series of oils on canvas in which Melani develops additional subjects. The lightness and underlying immateriality that can be considered a defining characteristic of this artist remain unchanged. The figures are entirely rendered with very light washes of color, with a formal synthesis that renders the subjects two-dimensional. All this shifts the representation, while still maintaining a realistic character, onto an allusively dreamlike and symbolist plane, a signature style of Innocenzo Melani, which we find in his mysterious female figures. Compared to the latter, chromatically, the absolute prevalence of white is lost, giving way to a delicate hue of purples and greens.

Innocenzo Melani was born in 1933. He is a painter who has chosen to devote himself almost entirely to female subjects, portraying them in various situations, always united, however, by a sense of unreality, almost as if they were images from a dream or a memory. His paintings today belong to private and public collections in the USA and Switzerland, Peru and Germany, Portugal and Canada, as well as in Japan, Austria, Norway, Spain, and Belgium.

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