Carlo Guarienti biography

- CARLO GUARIENTI PAINTER

 

Carlo Guarienti, born in Treviso in 1923, is an Italian artist known for his artistic journey characterized by a constant process of metamorphosis.

After graduating in medicine from the University of Padua in 1949, he became interested in art during the period he was called to arms between 1944 and 1945. During this time, he worked as a preparer of artistic anatomy at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence.

Returning to his hometown in 1946, Carlo Guarienti began his artistic career by creating still lifes, portraits, and significant works such as San Girolamo, exhibited in 1947 at the Modern Painters of Reality show in Milan. This exhibition, organized by Gregorio Sciltian, Pietro Annigoni, and Antonio and Xavier Bueno, represents an important manifesto of the group that opposed the abstract and informal art of the time.

Subsequently, Carlo Guarienti develops an artistic language that shifts towards a fantastic and visionary expression. During the 1960s, he experiments with an innovative technique inspired by the detachment of frescoes, using peeled plasters, cracks, collage, and synthetic resin mixed with color and sand. Influenced by artists like Max Ernst and Aloys Zötl, he creates a surrealist bestiary and later dedicates himself to painting mental geometries, pure forms, and rigorous perspective spaces.

In the 1980s, the artist focuses on the representation of still lifes, self-portraits, and views. His works are characterized by suspended atmospheres, oscillating between reality and unreality, consistency and transparency. Carlo Guarienti demonstrates a continuous search and experimentation in his artistic journey, also exploring plastic production and engraving art, combining archaic models with twentieth-century suggestions.

The artist stands out for their complex poetics, which is based on a realism that arises from thought and translates into enigmatic images, floating between dream and reality. Their works are described as purely mental painting, an essential and purified dimension of pure thought, which distills and separates emotion. It is not a mechanical and repetitive realism, but an essential realism that finds inspiration in the great Italian pictorial tradition.

Carlo Guarienti's long career has been characterized by numerous solo and group exhibitions in Italy and abroad. He has exhibited his works in important galleries such as the Galerie Weill in Paris, the Galerie Claude Jongen in Brussels, and the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan. He has also participated in significant art events such as the Venice Biennale, the Rome Quadriennale, and the Milan Biennale.

In addition to painting, he collaborated on the creation of sets for Italian television and created illustrations for Edizioni Curcio in Rome, including the work Il Purgatorio from 1966. He also produced a significant graphic artwork, with numerous lithographs, serigraphs, and engravings.

Carlo Guarienti remains one of the foremost representatives of the Italian figurative tradition of the twentieth century. His painting, characterized by essential realism and abstract thought, has left a significant mark on the contemporary artistic landscape.