Carlo Guarienti biography

- CARLO GUARIENTI PAINTER

 

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

After obtaining a degree in medicine from the University of Padua in 1949, he approached art during the period in which he was called to arms between 1944 and 1945. During this period, he worked as an anatomy trainer art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence.

Returning to his hometown in 1946, Carlo Guarienti began his artistic career creating still lifes, portraits and significant works such as the Saint Jerome, exhibited in 1947 at the exhibition of the Modern Painters of Reality 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 moves towards a fantastic and visionary expression. During the 1960s, he experimented with an innovative technique inspired by the tearing of frescoes , using peeling plaster, cracks, collage and synthetic resin mixed with color and sand. Influenced by artists such as Max Ernst and Aloys Zötl, he created a surrealist bestiary and subsequently dedicated himself to painting mental geometries, pure forms and rigorous perspective spaces.

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

The artist stands out for his complex poetics, which is based on a realism that arises from thought and translates into enigmatic images, which fluctuate between dream and reality. His works are described as a purely mental painting, an essential and purified dimension of pure thought, which distills and separates emotion. This 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 personal and collective 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 also participated in important artistic events such as the Venice Biennale , the Rome Quadrennial 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 an important graphic work , with numerous lithographs, serigraphs and engravings.

Carlo Guarienti remains one of the greatest 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 panorama.