We “modern” men, besieged by the unnaturally frenzied rhythms of the technological age, discover in the paintings of Gilberto Piccinini an almost primeval energy, that causes us to cast our minds back in time. This energy recalls those remote eras when immense forces were shaping our planet, filling it with water and life, and involves us in the eternal battle between the Oceans - in continual turbulence - and the dry land to which we cling, while still remaining fascinated by those deep, dark masses of water.

Observing this battle as depicted by Gilberto Piccinini reminds us of the verses of Job 38:8-11: “Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb, when I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness, when I fixed limits for it and set its doors and bars in place, when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther; here is where your proud waves halt’?”.

In Gilberto Piccinini’s works, the protagonist becomes not only the waves of the Oceans - a difficult subject - which he portrays in all their power and fury, but also the majestic rock faces of the islands and continents, flayed by the elements. The dramatic atmosphere of these paintings derives as much from the force of the powers in play, as from the leaden skies charged with clouds and rain looming over the dark turbulence of the seas. Piccinini’s paintings draw the mind towards the southernmost seas, to Cape Horn or South Georgia. They enable us to visualize the stories narrated by Melville, Shackleton, Coloane and Sepùlveda, and to feel the sharp, cold bite of the frozen Antarctic winds on our own skin.

We as modern men need to make contact with the powerful wildness of nature in order to rediscover ourselves. May the pounding of our frenetic thoughts be overpowered by the choral concert of the sea’s waves, so brilliantly expressed by our friend Gilberto, whose greatest satisfaction, I am sure, is to touch the hearts of all sea lovers to their very depths.

Stefano Pucciarelli

The magic fascination of the seascape of
GILBERTO PICCININI

"The sea is shrouded in mystery" - Joseph Conrad (From "Heart of darkness")

Some years ago, Walter Benjamin foretold the crisis of the figurative and landscape painting due to the triumph of art photography. Today we can say that his forecast has not become true; in fact after multifold experiments of deformation or refusal of the real, a revaluation of the figurative representation is gradually reappearing. This is happening because today's most intense and genuine artists, like Gilberto Piccinini, have acquired the awareness of the evocative power. They recreate their own subjective symbolic, vibrant reality, which they represent also thanks to the meaningful contribution of the modern and contemporary painting, often unconsciously made their own.

Piccinini lives in Milan but he has always had in his soul and heart the magic, ancestral call of the sea. And the sea is the only protagonist of his paintings; one can immediately feel the secret, mysterious intrinsic charm, its salty smell, its powerful voice, Jorge Luis Borges wrote: ''The sea is an ancient idiom I can't decipher'', when quoting Eugenio Montale, ''among the rocks the little waves whisper'' until one ''gets drunk with the voice/coming from your mouths, when they open''. This is the evocation power of an intimately felt representation.

Few painters can, like Piccinini, give a voice and a soul to the sea; few can magically depict its eternal flow on the canvas, its strength, its vitality, its poetry, its hidden melodies, its romantic charm, almost like it were a breathing creature.

All this is painted with Piccinini's unmistakeable ''symphony in blue'' woven with various shades of colours, from the lightest to the darkest. The nocturne in the moonlight evoke mysterious melodies, with their amazing representation of impetuous, winding waves, which break; or which run after each other and crash in their eternal flow which is a symbol of life and movement. It is a light and dark dance, with the crests lit by a tender, vibrant, metaphysical light and the obscure, mysterious whirlpools, which alternate light and shade; it is a symbolic projection of spiritual longings and unfathomable darkness of the unconscious. The result is a work that is a dream and heart desire, intimate journal and visual representation of the artist's own need either for tenderness and romanticism, cradled by a sweet, chopinian ''nocturne''; or for an intense abandoning to overwhelming passions inspired by a strong wish for freedom in accordance with Charles Baudelaire ''Free man, the sea will always be dear to your heart''.

Manrico Testi

Gilberto Piccinini
Identity and affinity

Profound research into nature has enabled Gilberto Piccinini to appraise and transport into art form the uninterrupted, perpetual flow of the sea’s waves. Thus begins the artist’s dedication towards rendering the sacredness of nature in all its beauty, as well as in its most cruel manifestations. His seascapes unfold in continual mutation, spellbinding and astounding. Their pictorial intensity varies always, whether in luminosity or in the blending of the tones.
Piccinini’s representations of sea and waves affect the soul to its greatest depths,
a heightening of life’s experience which in pictorial language becomes the emblem of identity and affinity.
The sea is rendered through unperceivable and perceivable water movements, with surges that rise up from the depths until they reach the waves on the surface.
He paints his thoughts and memories. The mind’s ramblings sometimes liberate strong emotions, such as moments of torment, and at these times the thirst for passion must be quenched by an explosion of creativity.
All is transformed in the drawing of the spaces while the tonalities express the innermost concepts of the spirit.
The marine landscapes, released from the rhetoric of classicism, at times stripped bare, appear to us in all their raw reality.
A simple reality, made up of the powerful contrasts between sky and sea, with an intentionally disturbed idealization; and a romantic vision, which at times deceives yet maintains its mysterious fascination.
The waves breaking on the coast have overcome a journey fraught with rocks, stones, crags and obstacles of all kinds, not unlike the life of the Maestro whose path is characterized by all the diverse emotional states that go towards shaping both the artist and the man.

Walter Venanzio

The search for movement and the representation of light are particularly noticeable in Gilberto Piccinini's works. The line of the infinite, both at the bottom of the page and in its middle, is always expressed with precision, so that the optical vision is perfect. The brush stroke is strong and clean. Almost all works are monochrome: the colour is blue in all its shades from azure to cobalt to midnight blue. It's the colour of the infinite, of purity and the immaterial. Out of the real space dimension it conjures up a feeling of the boundless, almost favouring the mental and spiritual aspect of the artistic creation. It reminds us of the sea, the sky and of the most abstract sides of a visible and understandable nature.

In the seascape and skies, which are the main themes of the artist, one can find a clear, synthetic and metaphysical naturalism. The artistic power which comes from it is underlined by the pursuit of light and shade, the visual impact shifts to the perceptive area of moods whereas the representation of movement is given by rapid lines which cross and run after each other.

The show of nature and its going on in time is also symbolic force which the artist, with his “magic realism”, interprets in a masterful way.


Lidia Silanos

When you are in front of Gilberto Piccinini's seascapes you wonder if the sea is the vessel or, on the contrary, it represents the content of something else. Is it the sea that contains the energy of the superior nature or is it the mysterious space which contains the amniotic fluid of the mother goddess. This rhetoric question is synthetically the personal representation of Gilberto Piccinini's Magical Realism.

He is the artist of broken silence, who evokes the origin of life, but also of its natural decadence. An artist of implicit geometry, who can avert his painter's eyes in order to shift his attention towards the sense of the unexpected listening.

In his seascapes, the crystallized and still breaking of the waves extends in the pictorial stroke, while the implied roar dissipates, like in an endless echo, on the emotional level.

"El mar es un antiguo lenguaje que yo no alcanzo a decifrar", said Borges, the sea is an ancient idiom I can't decode. But as the sea unites those very lands it separates, so its pictorial representation helps us to understand better all that is implied between life and the poetics of renewal.
In order to understand fully Piccinini's art one should prepare one's mind to catch the metempsychosis of the ideas and emotions which nourishes the symbology of the public archetype.

Riccardo Gioja

An artist of the blu stroke, of movements and surf, of dimensions and feelings among the sea waves and of nocturnal emotions; these are the subjects of the artist who loves to portray the sea in the twilight or at night. The technique and the choice of the image support the composition, the gestural expressiveness gives dynamism and continuity to the movement. The artist has already received acknowledgments from the public and the critics.

Guido M. Poggiani