BARBARA VINCENZI THE MIRROR OF THE TIMES
A careful observer of his time, Vito Giarrizzo takes in certain concepts coming from the early XX century avant-gardes, though coherently with his personal artistic search, with the purpose to suggest new themes and ideas allusive to other dimensions and levels of perception. The sensibility of the artist keeps up the pace with a paradoxical world, intense and full of questions.
His vast knowledge, acquired in time through study and meditations, introduces him to unexplored routes, a geography of unknown and outstanding worlds, where man and Mother Earth face one another.
Infringed rules of a pursued destiny design the inescapable fate of man and the Earth. The abuses caused by the progress ravage nature, that in turn rebels against humankind often triggering catastrophic effects, are appropriately depicted on his canvases.
Vito’s aim is to show to what extent innovation has definitely marred the real vision of life and numbed man’s capability of authentic feelings, so that he jeopardizes the quality of its whole existence.
A man who, "forced" from the social infrastructures, is suffocated in his true identity, into which voices are confounded with other unheeded voices decreeing the obscuration of the perceptive faculties of the whole humanity. His is a silent struggle against the narrow-mindedness and the wish to tune in with the times, achieved with updated models of communication and social organization. The artist turns his attention to the depths of the human mind, to his Self, undertaking a journey in which the submerged thoughts resurface, aided by a masterful use of color and matter. Matter that acts as protagonist, overlaps and structures in stories that to them it turns allude to new ones. Stratifications of writings, that are intersected pointing out new keys of reading. Labyrinths of thought, forms and hidden identities liberate themselves to seek a different time and space. New journeys, new traces, new meanings are created on the canvas, wishing to unmask the "lies" oppressing our society.
Energies open to new dimensions of space and time, disclosing the primordial archetypes appeased in man. New revelations interlock in the artist’s mind, who each time continues an exploratory journey providing us with new forms and perspective orders, reversals of plans and new horizons of sensibility.
Reflections nourished in quiet meditation, understanding revealed onto a thousand faces linking to other suggestive images, which in turn are allusive to more forms and unexpected emblematic messages. Lights and colours constantly meant to seize mysteries alluding to new worlds and cultures.
Precipices, cosmic vortexes, point towards hidden roads, journeys toward the roots of life and its breathtaking sight.
His light pursues the invisible, probes the unfathomable mirrored in the thousand reflections of enchanted landscapes, infiltrates the mist of thoughts, inverted images, brighten faces up, pays homage to life, irradiates our interiority, investigates on our doubts, visualizes the soul depths reflected in the world.
Jigsaw pieces by which landscapes, mountains, lakes, uncharted skies are created, sites where the primal magma synergically fuses with light, producing panoramic views foreboding remote forgotten roots. Dreamlike visions that become real and realities that become dreams. There is nothing mystic to it, except for the interplay of energies revealing parallel worlds, bewitched visions, ancient perceptions. Allegories and metaphors forge his memory, a place where, half-way between logic and irrationality, the magic and he unreal encounter.
Chance plays a major role in Giarrizzo's works. His complex subjects always unfold endowed with a casual and playful spirit.
Plans, sketches, and notes are granted a defined place in his canvases. The applied pigment features randomly mutable forms, which his inventiveness places within a new context where time and space are explored. In his works Time is subjected to a demonstrative plan. Since the traditional concepts of time and space have become old-fashioned, the artist is confronted with the necessity to undertake a change: the representation of hourglasses hints at illusory moments, time as perceived by the mind as well as the fleeting moment.
Stories, then, materialized by the use of colour that produces more stories, in which a masterful drawing acts as a detector of things unexpected.
A game played by forms and intellect, through which multiple ideas are conceived and synthesized.
Implying leaps in time and space, blindfolded figures playing blind man's buff symbolize the blurring of perception when faced with depth.
Constantly keeping up-to-date, eager to come to grips with the world that surrounds him: this is the distinctive trait of his most recent work. More and more persuaded of the necessity for a change that would acknowledge the inevitable relationship between reality and virtual life, Vito tackles a new medium: printmaking. His prints stem from a multitude of thoughts playfully reconfigured: here quotations from his paintings harmoniously interlock with quotations from the mass media. Irony dominates and draws our attention to the portraits of celebrities revisited by means of chromatic effects, paradoxical collocations, through which we are overwhelmed by amazement and amusement and defined as identities belonging to our times.
The democratization of images: the age of mechanical reproduction, an arena where, particularly in his latest production, Vito measures against the digital techniques provided by computer technologies, attentively examining today's culture and its intrinsic paradoxes that he transposes onto his collages, remix work, and unprecedented “arrangements” with a tongue-in-cheek sense for truth amid the parables told by the mass media and famous icons of advertising.
Barbara Vincenzi
A careful observer of his time, Vito Giarrizzo takes in certain concepts coming from the early XX century avant-gardes, though coherently with his personal artistic search, with the purpose to suggest new themes and ideas allusive to other dimensions and levels of perception. The sensibility of the artist keeps up the pace with a paradoxical world, intense and full of questions.
His vast knowledge, acquired in time through study and meditations, introduces him to unexplored routes, a geography of unknown and outstanding worlds, where man and Mother Earth face one another.
Infringed rules of a pursued destiny design the inescapable fate of man and the Earth. The abuses caused by the progress ravage nature, that in turn rebels against humankind often triggering catastrophic effects, are appropriately depicted on his canvases.
Vito’s aim is to show to what extent innovation has definitely marred the real vision of life and numbed man’s capability of authentic feelings, so that he jeopardizes the quality of its whole existence.
A man who, "forced" from the social infrastructures, is suffocated in his true identity, into which voices are confounded with other unheeded voices decreeing the obscuration of the perceptive faculties of the whole humanity. His is a silent struggle against the narrow-mindedness and the wish to tune in with the times, achieved with updated models of communication and social organization. The artist turns his attention to the depths of the human mind, to his Self, undertaking a journey in which the submerged thoughts resurface, aided by a masterful use of color and matter. Matter that acts as protagonist, overlaps and structures in stories that to them it turns allude to new ones. Stratifications of writings, that are intersected pointing out new keys of reading. Labyrinths of thought, forms and hidden identities liberate themselves to seek a different time and space. New journeys, new traces, new meanings are created on the canvas, wishing to unmask the "lies" oppressing our society.
Energies open to new dimensions of space and time, disclosing the primordial archetypes appeased in man. New revelations interlock in the artist’s mind, who each time continues an exploratory journey providing us with new forms and perspective orders, reversals of plans and new horizons of sensibility.
Reflections nourished in quiet meditation, understanding revealed onto a thousand faces linking to other suggestive images, which in turn are allusive to more forms and unexpected emblematic messages. Lights and colours constantly meant to seize mysteries alluding to new worlds and cultures.
Precipices, cosmic vortexes, point towards hidden roads, journeys toward the roots of life and its breathtaking sight.
His light pursues the invisible, probes the unfathomable mirrored in the thousand reflections of enchanted landscapes, infiltrates the mist of thoughts, inverted images, brighten faces up, pays homage to life, irradiates our interiority, investigates on our doubts, visualizes the soul depths reflected in the world.
Jigsaw pieces by which landscapes, mountains, lakes, uncharted skies are created, sites where the primal magma synergically fuses with light, producing panoramic views foreboding remote forgotten roots. Dreamlike visions that become real and realities that become dreams. There is nothing mystic to it, except for the interplay of energies revealing parallel worlds, bewitched visions, ancient perceptions. Allegories and metaphors forge his memory, a place where, half-way between logic and irrationality, the magic and he unreal encounter.
Chance plays a major role in Giarrizzo's works. His complex subjects always unfold endowed with a casual and playful spirit.
Plans, sketches, and notes are granted a defined place in his canvases. The applied pigment features randomly mutable forms, which his inventiveness places within a new context where time and space are explored. In his works Time is subjected to a demonstrative plan. Since the traditional concepts of time and space have become old-fashioned, the artist is confronted with the necessity to undertake a change: the representation of hourglasses hints at illusory moments, time as perceived by the mind as well as the fleeting moment.
Stories, then, materialized by the use of colour that produces more stories, in which a masterful drawing acts as a detector of things unexpected.
A game played by forms and intellect, through which multiple ideas are conceived and synthesized.
Implying leaps in time and space, blindfolded figures playing blind man's buff symbolize the blurring of perception when faced with depth.
Constantly keeping up-to-date, eager to come to grips with the world that surrounds him: this is the distinctive trait of his most recent work. More and more persuaded of the necessity for a change that would acknowledge the inevitable relationship between reality and virtual life, Vito tackles a new medium: printmaking. His prints stem from a multitude of thoughts playfully reconfigured: here quotations from his paintings harmoniously interlock with quotations from the mass media. Irony dominates and draws our attention to the portraits of celebrities revisited by means of chromatic effects, paradoxical collocations, through which we are overwhelmed by amazement and amusement and defined as identities belonging to our times.
The democratization of images: the age of mechanical reproduction, an arena where, particularly in his latest production, Vito measures against the digital techniques provided by computer technologies, attentively examining today's culture and its intrinsic paradoxes that he transposes onto his collages, remix work, and unprecedented “arrangements” with a tongue-in-cheek sense for truth amid the parables told by the mass media and famous icons of advertising.
Barbara Vincenzi
CRITICAL TEXTS
Alessandro Bini (1993)
VITO GIARRIZZO lives and works as an architect in Florence.
For over thirty years, due to his training as well as his profession he has gone through several meaningful experiences both in Italy and in South America which shaped his vocation as a painter.
His personal research in content, matched by a philosophical and idealistic aptitude to accomplish a complex artistic output devoid of complacent virtuosity, has prevented his name to reach a wide public.
He combines a “Mediterranean” sensibility with a deep spiritual aspiration to explore the great themes of life and is prone to question the essence of the human mind as a source of images and inspiration.
That of the Painter and his inspiration constitutes a leit motiv throughout his works, where the painter, eventually unmasked, is able to see “new and unexpected things” by discovering his true self. Thereby he confronts Man’s anguish as he devours his own Self in the quest; he who looks everywhere but ineffectually, who is unable to see, who hurls his own creations as disorienting objects in space, wrecks floating through a timeless space, a heap interrupting the archetypal purity of universal rhythms.
But there are both an earthbound life-generating spiral and a celestial spiral, heading towards the cosmic origins of Life. What is striking is the perspectival fragmentation of planes, the dynamics of depth, as well as the narrative of what takes place within the inner soul by adopting unlikely viewpoints. Both the use of colours and composition are attuned to the ideas they mean to convey and thus they are to be interpreted. It is the flight – the mind soaring high in space and time – that governs all images. The painter suspended in space, the seascape projecting toward the viewer, the ambiguous interchange between front and rear, the heads floating, all add to the symbolic language inherent to inner forces.
Faced with the empty canvas, without a preordained project, even without a defined subject but exploring what has yet not real life, following a personal train of thoughts - his own passion and hopes - he questions a future originated by thought.
Faced with the chaos of events, social disorders, and the confusion of roles and identities, the painter ponders and sees a way out through the haze: he sees a new world generated by Chaos itself, where life and death alternately beget each other. It is the dawn of the new millennium.
Alessandro Bini
From the foreword to the solo exhibition at the Palazzo Comunale in La Rufina (FI) – Florence 1993
Alberto Quattrini (1997)
What is most striking about VITO GIARRIZZO is his ability to absorb the artistic discourse pursued by the great currents which conferred untraceability to our century, yet preserving an originality acquired by positioning himself first as an observer, then – thanks to his sifting sensibility – as an interacting presence. Nonetheless, the metaphysical as well as the surreal aspect feature as prevailing elements characterizing many of his works, whereas the great mural painters’ message does not remain unheeded.
Perhaps, it is the very reference to these artists that enable Vito Giarrizzo’s humanity to emerge, himself a demure artist who searches painting for an answer to our existential concerns: an answer that cannot be reassuring, since life is not like that, nor it can result just in fruitless criticism, since the artist’s voice does not adjust to shout to the four winds.
An answer, therefore, reflecting the swift succession of the painter’s states of mind, without situating him in any easily defined context.
Alberto Quattrini
From the foreword to the solo exhibition at the Biblioteca Malpighi (Benjamin Room) – Bologna 1997
“A PLAUSIBLE MODERN” by Gregorio Scalise
The majority of VITO GIARRIZZO’s works belong to the last period of his busy career. Selected and grouped on a basis of sequence shots, they reveal an analytical-critical attentiveness towards society and its multi-sided outlooks. Developing a critical conviction and, at the same time, preserving one’s artistic principles requires an unobtrusive as well as engaged involvement.
There are artists who underline their dissident statements by using a somewhat pictorial verbosity which, while one appreciates the intention, on the other hand, is confronted with embarrassing outcomes.
Vito Giarrizzo graduated in Architecture in 1970, only two years since the legendary 1968. He travelled widely in the Middle East, Africa and South America, took part in important architectural projects, which undoubtedly have contributed to settle some qualities connected to the artistic practice, yet not all of them positive, inasmuch as they provided the artist with a distance and a controlled use of materials. Almost all of his works, in fact, display a successful relationship between a critical and an artistic concept. Major underground currents interlock in his paintings which, in some instances, remind one of Carrà or certain Mexican artists (possibly Rivera). An extremely curious fact – elsewhere liable to be further debated -, this inclusion of early XX century suggestions that converge in the Mexican murals in the interpretation by a Western architect in the form of a continuation as well as a response.
Elsewhere, his painterly marks may evoke either Magritte or post-cubist solutions, enlivened by virtue of an alchemical matter that overlaps with the informal.
What is most notable in this art is his interpretation of what has not been wholly explored of modern art. On the whole, and not always unreasonably, contemporary painting is stigmatized for its monotony in style and subject matter alike so that, while a way out from the modern is achieved, yet its accomplishments remain unknown. Possibly due to the aforesaid distance and discretion, here the artist intentionally halts just before the boundary to question relentlessly on the paths to be covered, the variants to be added, the more legitimate subject matter to deal with.
The opening of the XX century has proved to be vertiginous, owing to its movements, its great exponents, its revolutionary drive, the conspicuous legacy delivered to its heirs, its seminal disruptions of form and colour. One may as well read this beginning as an end in itself, the end of art, the end of expression.
We would like to conclude recalling what a French poet argued about Leonardo da Vinci, when he asserted that if he happened to be in front of an abyss, he would have designed a bridge. Thus, an actively dynamic possibility of construction, for solutions, steadfast and unwavering.”Si licet parva componere magnis”: Giarrizzo would have come up with a similar typically architectural intuition (“designer of bridges”).
Great XX century art has shown its achievements while it suggested, when not imposed, the divide not only with respect to the old canons, but also to the ones fostered by modernity giving birth, as is commonly acknowledged, to the movement acknowledged as post-modern. What if one tried to carry forward those great indications ignoring non-redeemable rifts, instead reflecting upon and experimenting with new transitions and maybe transactions?
It is likely that Giarrizzo would have thought about this. After all, the limited use of suggestions and forms would not have but led him in that direction.
Gregorio Scalise
From the preface to the exhibition “Cuori di carta” at the Biblioteca Comunale “Casa di Khaoula” – Bologna 2007
“THE WORLD’S ANXIETIES” by Barbara Vincenzi
Vito Giarrizzo was born in La Spezia in 1940.
Since an early age he developed a penchant for drawing and painting. This led him to take classes at the Liceo Artistico in Carrara and, later, to attend the faculty of Architecture at the University of Florence, where he graduated in 1970.
There has always been a close relationship between his profession as architect and his role as a painter and it was his job that took him throughout important experiences both in Italy and abroad, such as his travels to South America, Africa, Middle East and Far East which bore a deep influence on his artistic concept.
Since 2007 he devoted entirely to painting, working mostly in Bologna, where he lives at present.
His search drew him toward a complex and profound artistic discourse, that questions the great themes underlying human existence. By dint of an incessant experimentation in diverse pictorial media, he came forth with a very personal concept of Art, a personal mode of expression, careless of cheap vogues crossing culture and style.
The World’s anxieties, one’s daily unease, Man’s race towards unattainable goals in the search for his own Self, of his own innermost essence: Man unmasks and liberates himself of all superstructures so as to unveil the soul’s truest emotions. Vito Giarrizzo digs into unexplored depths, probes both nature and the human mind to unearth hidden truths. Different questions prompt him to represent Man as if plunged into a parallel Universe, within an dreamlike dimension ridden with unlikely realities: our innermost dimension.
Thanks to skilful perspective arrangements, fragmented or upturned planes, images are liberated within a timeless space. Visionary surroundings and definitely refined shapes confront each other, then generate a geography populated by symbols or inner visions. This is the domain of the mind, that of thinking and memories, of Man’s great existential changes.
Vito explores the great movements of the XX century in Italy and Europe, underground currents overlap within his art echoing both Carrà and the great Mexican mural painters; at other times, his surrealist atmospheres remind one of Magritte or evoke post-cubist suggestions. These are well-known languages to him, which he has absorbed and reconfigured in a discreet, engaged version avoiding easy stylistic formulae or ephemeral trends.
Barbara Vincenzi
From the preface to the solo exhibition at galleria Lovetti – Ferrara 2008
“THE EARTH’S GAME” by Barbara Vincenzi
His subjects are of no easy interpretation being the result of profound meditation and questioning about Man and his life on planet Earth. It is just as well the theme of Man and his current predicament the key to reading his latest artistic output.
The crumbling of all certainties, greed and Man’s predatory madness, his incapability to slow down his own race towards the irreversible damages caused to the ecosystem, the degradation of the environment, slaughters, all of them Vito views as a generalized collapse triggering a sequence of ever-changing sensations and states of mind which he tries to capture on his canvases in almost surreal settings.
The rarefied atmospheres that characterize his aerial landscapes communicate a sense of emptiness, dismay, inner chasm that forces one to meditate upon one’s destiny.
Suddenly a window opens onto the world: like an acrobat, a man holding his everyday paraphernalia attempts to walk on a suspended rope above a remote world ridden with uncertainties.
He captures on the canvas the existential “burden” of Man, unable to carry the world upon his shoulders, recalling the precarious balance of those men exerting their power upon a by now unknown planet.
His latest production emanates a metaphysical composure, detached from the real world, dense with metaphors, pervaded by an aura of unavoidable drama.
Thus, the works of Vito Giarrizzo, seemingly “distanced”, sophisticatedly conceived by means of their warm colours and controlled light urge the viewer to reflect upon the unknown destiny of our planet.
These are pressing issues, so far rarely represented, discreetly and rigorously transposed in a language which, aware of the past, is capable of renovating incessantly through ideas and effects of undeniable modernity .
Extract from EIKON n. 9, July-August 2010.
“IN THE EYES OF THE UNIVERSE” by Antonella Iozzo
Possible transitions within the impossible protean condition disclosed by Vito Giarrizzo. A codified world in which time blows through the soul; while bordering on the realm of the invisible, emotional alchemies freeze the instant and depict its evolution. Journeys towards a night of flagrant beauty, truth, meaningful experiences. Unmistakable intense expression that takes us by the hand into the artist’s world to reveal its trajectories, rigorous and laden with memories as they are.
Fragmented destinies and structures built out of vast logical plans constitute the core of his works. A wide, labyrinthine network, where either object or subject lives of and for the others, where his retrospective gaze interpenetrates the very vision of the world which is gaining ground in contemporary conscience. Worlds hidden behind an archaeology of the future beget primordial forebodings arousing energy, jerks, contractions, that Giarrizzo dilutes with highly expressive intensity between cosmos and earth.
So the sky, vastness and infinity interact with existential tension as long as a symbolic archaic journey takes place on the canvas: and the universe quivers. Endless issues cast their shadow upon the ever-changing instant, just as questions arise where reason reaches high. Enigmatic quizzes entangle with thought encompassing everything with its metaphysical, surreal, alienated aura, whereas any possible junctions and hypothetic references are established on the canvas. Events that need to be analyzed more and more in depth, starting from appearances up to the innermost essence, the latter brought to light by dint of an inexhaustible
imagery hidden inside the artist’s subconscious. Self-conscious appearances, representations only shading the original intuition, that is visible and invisible, spirals dragging us inside the painting, the very heart of perceptual impressions, of absolute awareness, of infinity, of an alternative reality suspended and delicate like a sensory recollection inhabiting form. Art-generated truth, seductive spark that lies in conscious desire, soul annihilated by grief, solitude, by the dismay of the self faced with the mysteries of Life.
Indeed, Giarrizzo’s feature as new creations, in which life is entrapped and the world is reasserted.
Are these sites inhabited by a metaphysical sublime belonging to an aesthetically insensate universe of mere appearances? Questions equidistant from his overwhelming strength as well as from the exhilarating feeling of power in which he sinks. A set of images stemming from inspiration in the shape of constellations of individual emotions clinging to a reflection of reality. Giarrizzo’s works do not feature as traditionally welded to an harmonious clear narrative, nor they are based on mere description; on the contrary, they are substantiated with dizziness, foreboding, change, uncertainty, doubt, vision and metaphysical escape, the whole encapsulated within fleeting forms resembling orbits, sudden flashes aimed at touching the boundaries of silence, similar to lunar eclipses. As if summoning a higher moral dimension, it seems that the hidden soul of painting would start probing the instincts domain, such a subtle, dangerous game, unpredictable builder of castles in the air, ready to escape the pitfalls of fate.
The artist’s mood seems to collide against the painted objects, simultaneously conflicting and sublimated; the senses feel its subdued rhythm and, through his colour texture, succeeds in touching the edges of possibility and dispensing with melancholy. Reflections scattered throughout as boundless wilderness, as oneiric transfigurations of inner landscapes show vast perspectives populated with iconic elements. To the sides, on the other hand, either memory or reminiscences, more precisely what the eye perceives and the mind retains, build up connections between the past and the rising glow that illuminates the path towards the innermost values and truths. Vital tension matching static presence, beauty matching tragic sweetness, a dichotomy of human impulses governing a purely poetic atmosphere that asserts itself as the absolute essence of Giarrizzo’s work.
His own seems to be a search directed towards the most obscure aspects of human consciousness, aimed at discovering a further and more profound reason to exist. A search that conquers the primordial acknowledged as the ever-present element in our society. Glimpses of inspiration, dreamy suspensions, reflections, hopes and desires eloped from the holocaust of the mind on a nocturnal instant instinctively and irrationally acted upon, cradle a world immersed into the unconscious longing for the archaic, a world without place nor history, mere acoustic vibration imploding into universal emptiness. Giarrizzo’s aesthetic concept conceive its motion, thereby bringing out novel emotional trails that imply new modes of expression. These are structures of the imagination suddenly charged with existential flashes. Awakening near the boundaries of the world, living breath that wishes to retrieve the intensity of an instant, a fragment, a cell endowed with the possibility to pierce the melancholy of disillusionment and unveil the unsaid, a truth enclosed in its inherent mystery.
Upheaval balancing between the light hinting at allusive eternity and its own limit that keeps on arousing the artist’s ceaseless creation of novel sensations, of higher aims. Further away, approaching the faint lights of dusk, the clear awareness of a centuries-old evolution begins its inexorable crumbling, all balances quiver amid a cluster of stirrings carrying upon themselves the burden of starts and dizzy spells common to all mankind. From this cell the artist draws more and more energy and inspiration. Chromatic saturation, hurried pace, peculiar spatial arrangements along with the sensation of estrangement belonging to the human being escaping his own conscience: but what about Man? Man pulls the strings of illusion, soaking intellect into spiritual visions, ethereal and morally uplifting, at the same time overtly romantic in its twilights and moonlights set beyond the limits of human perception. Beyond that, there is the ideal. When reason is unable to grasp the force of visions, the body gives in and the great stage of the world speaks to the soul. It is like a vast ocean that streams through all concepts, certainties, and doubts and flows into Vito Giarrizzo’s creativity as the perfect storm that raises the incandescent ancestral breath and envelopes universal Life with celestial thrill.
Antonella Iozzo©Produzione riservata (7/02/2011)
Testo critico di presentazione in www.bluarte.it
Alessandro Bini (1993)
VITO GIARRIZZO lives and works as an architect in Florence.
For over thirty years, due to his training as well as his profession he has gone through several meaningful experiences both in Italy and in South America which shaped his vocation as a painter.
His personal research in content, matched by a philosophical and idealistic aptitude to accomplish a complex artistic output devoid of complacent virtuosity, has prevented his name to reach a wide public.
He combines a “Mediterranean” sensibility with a deep spiritual aspiration to explore the great themes of life and is prone to question the essence of the human mind as a source of images and inspiration.
That of the Painter and his inspiration constitutes a leit motiv throughout his works, where the painter, eventually unmasked, is able to see “new and unexpected things” by discovering his true self. Thereby he confronts Man’s anguish as he devours his own Self in the quest; he who looks everywhere but ineffectually, who is unable to see, who hurls his own creations as disorienting objects in space, wrecks floating through a timeless space, a heap interrupting the archetypal purity of universal rhythms.
But there are both an earthbound life-generating spiral and a celestial spiral, heading towards the cosmic origins of Life. What is striking is the perspectival fragmentation of planes, the dynamics of depth, as well as the narrative of what takes place within the inner soul by adopting unlikely viewpoints. Both the use of colours and composition are attuned to the ideas they mean to convey and thus they are to be interpreted. It is the flight – the mind soaring high in space and time – that governs all images. The painter suspended in space, the seascape projecting toward the viewer, the ambiguous interchange between front and rear, the heads floating, all add to the symbolic language inherent to inner forces.
Faced with the empty canvas, without a preordained project, even without a defined subject but exploring what has yet not real life, following a personal train of thoughts - his own passion and hopes - he questions a future originated by thought.
Faced with the chaos of events, social disorders, and the confusion of roles and identities, the painter ponders and sees a way out through the haze: he sees a new world generated by Chaos itself, where life and death alternately beget each other. It is the dawn of the new millennium.
Alessandro Bini
From the foreword to the solo exhibition at the Palazzo Comunale in La Rufina (FI) – Florence 1993
Alberto Quattrini (1997)
What is most striking about VITO GIARRIZZO is his ability to absorb the artistic discourse pursued by the great currents which conferred untraceability to our century, yet preserving an originality acquired by positioning himself first as an observer, then – thanks to his sifting sensibility – as an interacting presence. Nonetheless, the metaphysical as well as the surreal aspect feature as prevailing elements characterizing many of his works, whereas the great mural painters’ message does not remain unheeded.
Perhaps, it is the very reference to these artists that enable Vito Giarrizzo’s humanity to emerge, himself a demure artist who searches painting for an answer to our existential concerns: an answer that cannot be reassuring, since life is not like that, nor it can result just in fruitless criticism, since the artist’s voice does not adjust to shout to the four winds.
An answer, therefore, reflecting the swift succession of the painter’s states of mind, without situating him in any easily defined context.
Alberto Quattrini
From the foreword to the solo exhibition at the Biblioteca Malpighi (Benjamin Room) – Bologna 1997
“A PLAUSIBLE MODERN” by Gregorio Scalise
The majority of VITO GIARRIZZO’s works belong to the last period of his busy career. Selected and grouped on a basis of sequence shots, they reveal an analytical-critical attentiveness towards society and its multi-sided outlooks. Developing a critical conviction and, at the same time, preserving one’s artistic principles requires an unobtrusive as well as engaged involvement.
There are artists who underline their dissident statements by using a somewhat pictorial verbosity which, while one appreciates the intention, on the other hand, is confronted with embarrassing outcomes.
Vito Giarrizzo graduated in Architecture in 1970, only two years since the legendary 1968. He travelled widely in the Middle East, Africa and South America, took part in important architectural projects, which undoubtedly have contributed to settle some qualities connected to the artistic practice, yet not all of them positive, inasmuch as they provided the artist with a distance and a controlled use of materials. Almost all of his works, in fact, display a successful relationship between a critical and an artistic concept. Major underground currents interlock in his paintings which, in some instances, remind one of Carrà or certain Mexican artists (possibly Rivera). An extremely curious fact – elsewhere liable to be further debated -, this inclusion of early XX century suggestions that converge in the Mexican murals in the interpretation by a Western architect in the form of a continuation as well as a response.
Elsewhere, his painterly marks may evoke either Magritte or post-cubist solutions, enlivened by virtue of an alchemical matter that overlaps with the informal.
What is most notable in this art is his interpretation of what has not been wholly explored of modern art. On the whole, and not always unreasonably, contemporary painting is stigmatized for its monotony in style and subject matter alike so that, while a way out from the modern is achieved, yet its accomplishments remain unknown. Possibly due to the aforesaid distance and discretion, here the artist intentionally halts just before the boundary to question relentlessly on the paths to be covered, the variants to be added, the more legitimate subject matter to deal with.
The opening of the XX century has proved to be vertiginous, owing to its movements, its great exponents, its revolutionary drive, the conspicuous legacy delivered to its heirs, its seminal disruptions of form and colour. One may as well read this beginning as an end in itself, the end of art, the end of expression.
We would like to conclude recalling what a French poet argued about Leonardo da Vinci, when he asserted that if he happened to be in front of an abyss, he would have designed a bridge. Thus, an actively dynamic possibility of construction, for solutions, steadfast and unwavering.”Si licet parva componere magnis”: Giarrizzo would have come up with a similar typically architectural intuition (“designer of bridges”).
Great XX century art has shown its achievements while it suggested, when not imposed, the divide not only with respect to the old canons, but also to the ones fostered by modernity giving birth, as is commonly acknowledged, to the movement acknowledged as post-modern. What if one tried to carry forward those great indications ignoring non-redeemable rifts, instead reflecting upon and experimenting with new transitions and maybe transactions?
It is likely that Giarrizzo would have thought about this. After all, the limited use of suggestions and forms would not have but led him in that direction.
Gregorio Scalise
From the preface to the exhibition “Cuori di carta” at the Biblioteca Comunale “Casa di Khaoula” – Bologna 2007
“THE WORLD’S ANXIETIES” by Barbara Vincenzi
Vito Giarrizzo was born in La Spezia in 1940.
Since an early age he developed a penchant for drawing and painting. This led him to take classes at the Liceo Artistico in Carrara and, later, to attend the faculty of Architecture at the University of Florence, where he graduated in 1970.
There has always been a close relationship between his profession as architect and his role as a painter and it was his job that took him throughout important experiences both in Italy and abroad, such as his travels to South America, Africa, Middle East and Far East which bore a deep influence on his artistic concept.
Since 2007 he devoted entirely to painting, working mostly in Bologna, where he lives at present.
His search drew him toward a complex and profound artistic discourse, that questions the great themes underlying human existence. By dint of an incessant experimentation in diverse pictorial media, he came forth with a very personal concept of Art, a personal mode of expression, careless of cheap vogues crossing culture and style.
The World’s anxieties, one’s daily unease, Man’s race towards unattainable goals in the search for his own Self, of his own innermost essence: Man unmasks and liberates himself of all superstructures so as to unveil the soul’s truest emotions. Vito Giarrizzo digs into unexplored depths, probes both nature and the human mind to unearth hidden truths. Different questions prompt him to represent Man as if plunged into a parallel Universe, within an dreamlike dimension ridden with unlikely realities: our innermost dimension.
Thanks to skilful perspective arrangements, fragmented or upturned planes, images are liberated within a timeless space. Visionary surroundings and definitely refined shapes confront each other, then generate a geography populated by symbols or inner visions. This is the domain of the mind, that of thinking and memories, of Man’s great existential changes.
Vito explores the great movements of the XX century in Italy and Europe, underground currents overlap within his art echoing both Carrà and the great Mexican mural painters; at other times, his surrealist atmospheres remind one of Magritte or evoke post-cubist suggestions. These are well-known languages to him, which he has absorbed and reconfigured in a discreet, engaged version avoiding easy stylistic formulae or ephemeral trends.
Barbara Vincenzi
From the preface to the solo exhibition at galleria Lovetti – Ferrara 2008
“THE EARTH’S GAME” by Barbara Vincenzi
His subjects are of no easy interpretation being the result of profound meditation and questioning about Man and his life on planet Earth. It is just as well the theme of Man and his current predicament the key to reading his latest artistic output.
The crumbling of all certainties, greed and Man’s predatory madness, his incapability to slow down his own race towards the irreversible damages caused to the ecosystem, the degradation of the environment, slaughters, all of them Vito views as a generalized collapse triggering a sequence of ever-changing sensations and states of mind which he tries to capture on his canvases in almost surreal settings.
The rarefied atmospheres that characterize his aerial landscapes communicate a sense of emptiness, dismay, inner chasm that forces one to meditate upon one’s destiny.
Suddenly a window opens onto the world: like an acrobat, a man holding his everyday paraphernalia attempts to walk on a suspended rope above a remote world ridden with uncertainties.
He captures on the canvas the existential “burden” of Man, unable to carry the world upon his shoulders, recalling the precarious balance of those men exerting their power upon a by now unknown planet.
His latest production emanates a metaphysical composure, detached from the real world, dense with metaphors, pervaded by an aura of unavoidable drama.
Thus, the works of Vito Giarrizzo, seemingly “distanced”, sophisticatedly conceived by means of their warm colours and controlled light urge the viewer to reflect upon the unknown destiny of our planet.
These are pressing issues, so far rarely represented, discreetly and rigorously transposed in a language which, aware of the past, is capable of renovating incessantly through ideas and effects of undeniable modernity .
Extract from EIKON n. 9, July-August 2010.
“IN THE EYES OF THE UNIVERSE” by Antonella Iozzo
Possible transitions within the impossible protean condition disclosed by Vito Giarrizzo. A codified world in which time blows through the soul; while bordering on the realm of the invisible, emotional alchemies freeze the instant and depict its evolution. Journeys towards a night of flagrant beauty, truth, meaningful experiences. Unmistakable intense expression that takes us by the hand into the artist’s world to reveal its trajectories, rigorous and laden with memories as they are.
Fragmented destinies and structures built out of vast logical plans constitute the core of his works. A wide, labyrinthine network, where either object or subject lives of and for the others, where his retrospective gaze interpenetrates the very vision of the world which is gaining ground in contemporary conscience. Worlds hidden behind an archaeology of the future beget primordial forebodings arousing energy, jerks, contractions, that Giarrizzo dilutes with highly expressive intensity between cosmos and earth.
So the sky, vastness and infinity interact with existential tension as long as a symbolic archaic journey takes place on the canvas: and the universe quivers. Endless issues cast their shadow upon the ever-changing instant, just as questions arise where reason reaches high. Enigmatic quizzes entangle with thought encompassing everything with its metaphysical, surreal, alienated aura, whereas any possible junctions and hypothetic references are established on the canvas. Events that need to be analyzed more and more in depth, starting from appearances up to the innermost essence, the latter brought to light by dint of an inexhaustible
imagery hidden inside the artist’s subconscious. Self-conscious appearances, representations only shading the original intuition, that is visible and invisible, spirals dragging us inside the painting, the very heart of perceptual impressions, of absolute awareness, of infinity, of an alternative reality suspended and delicate like a sensory recollection inhabiting form. Art-generated truth, seductive spark that lies in conscious desire, soul annihilated by grief, solitude, by the dismay of the self faced with the mysteries of Life.
Indeed, Giarrizzo’s feature as new creations, in which life is entrapped and the world is reasserted.
Are these sites inhabited by a metaphysical sublime belonging to an aesthetically insensate universe of mere appearances? Questions equidistant from his overwhelming strength as well as from the exhilarating feeling of power in which he sinks. A set of images stemming from inspiration in the shape of constellations of individual emotions clinging to a reflection of reality. Giarrizzo’s works do not feature as traditionally welded to an harmonious clear narrative, nor they are based on mere description; on the contrary, they are substantiated with dizziness, foreboding, change, uncertainty, doubt, vision and metaphysical escape, the whole encapsulated within fleeting forms resembling orbits, sudden flashes aimed at touching the boundaries of silence, similar to lunar eclipses. As if summoning a higher moral dimension, it seems that the hidden soul of painting would start probing the instincts domain, such a subtle, dangerous game, unpredictable builder of castles in the air, ready to escape the pitfalls of fate.
The artist’s mood seems to collide against the painted objects, simultaneously conflicting and sublimated; the senses feel its subdued rhythm and, through his colour texture, succeeds in touching the edges of possibility and dispensing with melancholy. Reflections scattered throughout as boundless wilderness, as oneiric transfigurations of inner landscapes show vast perspectives populated with iconic elements. To the sides, on the other hand, either memory or reminiscences, more precisely what the eye perceives and the mind retains, build up connections between the past and the rising glow that illuminates the path towards the innermost values and truths. Vital tension matching static presence, beauty matching tragic sweetness, a dichotomy of human impulses governing a purely poetic atmosphere that asserts itself as the absolute essence of Giarrizzo’s work.
His own seems to be a search directed towards the most obscure aspects of human consciousness, aimed at discovering a further and more profound reason to exist. A search that conquers the primordial acknowledged as the ever-present element in our society. Glimpses of inspiration, dreamy suspensions, reflections, hopes and desires eloped from the holocaust of the mind on a nocturnal instant instinctively and irrationally acted upon, cradle a world immersed into the unconscious longing for the archaic, a world without place nor history, mere acoustic vibration imploding into universal emptiness. Giarrizzo’s aesthetic concept conceive its motion, thereby bringing out novel emotional trails that imply new modes of expression. These are structures of the imagination suddenly charged with existential flashes. Awakening near the boundaries of the world, living breath that wishes to retrieve the intensity of an instant, a fragment, a cell endowed with the possibility to pierce the melancholy of disillusionment and unveil the unsaid, a truth enclosed in its inherent mystery.
Upheaval balancing between the light hinting at allusive eternity and its own limit that keeps on arousing the artist’s ceaseless creation of novel sensations, of higher aims. Further away, approaching the faint lights of dusk, the clear awareness of a centuries-old evolution begins its inexorable crumbling, all balances quiver amid a cluster of stirrings carrying upon themselves the burden of starts and dizzy spells common to all mankind. From this cell the artist draws more and more energy and inspiration. Chromatic saturation, hurried pace, peculiar spatial arrangements along with the sensation of estrangement belonging to the human being escaping his own conscience: but what about Man? Man pulls the strings of illusion, soaking intellect into spiritual visions, ethereal and morally uplifting, at the same time overtly romantic in its twilights and moonlights set beyond the limits of human perception. Beyond that, there is the ideal. When reason is unable to grasp the force of visions, the body gives in and the great stage of the world speaks to the soul. It is like a vast ocean that streams through all concepts, certainties, and doubts and flows into Vito Giarrizzo’s creativity as the perfect storm that raises the incandescent ancestral breath and envelopes universal Life with celestial thrill.
Antonella Iozzo©Produzione riservata (7/02/2011)
Testo critico di presentazione in www.bluarte.it