Giulio Scapaticci, a Lyrical Painter in Milan

AN EXHIBIT BY AN ARTIST FOCUSED ON EXISTENTIAL ISSUES WILL BE INAUGURATED ON MONDAY 8 MAY AT 6PM IN THE SALA RISTORANTE BOCCONI

Giulio Scapaticci (1933-2006) was an artist in the painting-politics trend in the 1950s and 1960s defined as “Existential Realism” (Marco Valsecchi). A student of Aldo Carpi from ’51 to ’57, he is considered one of the most lyrical painters of his generation.
 
Immediately known as an artist sensitive to existential issues, he began painting 1950s and 1960s Milan. His paintings focus on the city’s typical buildings with iron railings, peeling windows looking out on a dark urban landscape, grey and desolate industrial suburbs, butchered beef and fish hanging on hooks.
 
In the mid-1970s, he left Milan to move to the Oltrepò Pavese area. Here his painting transformed, bypassing the previous dark, monochromatic and introspective experience and a rustic world appeared, with brighter and more lively shades: farms, static nature, death, insects, rivers, relaxing sandy coves.
 
Starting in the 1980s, after returning to Milan, he began painting again with more painful humanity, his insects transformed and provoked feelings of loneliness and voluntary silences. Walls, butterflies and cockroaches make up a new setting in which physical uncertainty precedes metaphysical uncertainty.
 
The marks drawn on his canvases are not simply a photograph of an outside world, often perceived as an enemy, but rather seek out a meaning, perhaps a possible tangible representation of his being against it. What is figurative and formal, apparently simple, is transformed into the informal of emotions and feelings, an erosion of the surface of things, a stripped down and atonished dialogue between the soul and art focusing on feelings. Scapaticci loved to say that there is something you cannot see and can never see in a painting, something that is impossible to classify, the soul, a spirit of revenge, an intuition of an archetypical sense of things, a communication of personal wounds.
 
The exhibit will be available until 23 June 2017, Mondays through Saturdays, from 9am to 12pm.
 

by Susanna Della Vedova
Translated by Jenna Walker