buon giorno,ho ricevuto da un collezionista di mio padre, qualche foglio che aveva copiato da Artecultura di Martelli, con un aricolo in inglese che lo riguardava. Per chi, giovane,non lo avesse conosciuto. Pietro Grassi was born in Umago dIstria in 1922. After doing classical studies in Capodistria he was called up and fought in Bosnia where he was later taken prisoner. Once he was freed he went back to his mother country Istria. Unfortunately in 1946 he was forced to leave it once again this time as a refugee when he set off for Trieste. He took up painting as a self-starter in 1950 and from that year on he has kept on illustrating passionately both his mother country and Trieste through landscapes, seascapes, views and industrial scenes. The bright chromatic impastos, rich in naturalistic allusions, obtained both with a brush or a spatula, well represent the essence of an extremely vital and intense painting and reveal the painters excellent taste and adequate sense of proportion. What strikes us most in Grassis painting is his constant search for light effects or his attempt to capture the innumerable types of reflection of light both on the more physical and the poetic or psychological level. The artist is indeed well aware that there is much more to painting than the mere representation of reality. His autonomous language though rooted in Impressionism yet shows an Expressionist intensity and transforms reality in a way that closely resembles abstraction. His works began featuring in exhibitions starting from 1959 on the occasion of the inauguration of the Galleria dei Rettori following advice from the poet Carolus-Cergoli who also owned the gallery. Thenceforth his works often featured in exhibits both in Trieste and around Italy. He was thus able to win the approval of the critics and the public despite the frequent clashes he had with the art world owing to his strong personality. Learning how to separate the brusque and dismissive man from his highly sensitive works means learning how to truly appreciate the latters great expressive force, their vitality, their subtle nature and eventually the incredible peacefulness and quiet they are able to convey to us. In his last production Pietro Grassi went through a completely new artistic season producing works characterised by a timeless language, magically suspended in a mixture of luminous evanescence and strong Expressionist hues. Claudio H. Martelli Curriculum Starting from 1954 he participated in hundreds of group and collective exhibitions both in Italy and abroad. One-man shows of his works have also been held on several occasions in public and private art galleries in Trieste, Udine, Gorizia, Venice, Verona, Treviso, Parma, Milan, Turin, Novara, Genoa, Rome, Florence and many other Italian smaller towns. As it would be practically impossible to cite here the hundreds of reviews on the artist which have been published by newspapers, art magazines and other specialist art journals, we suggest that a look be given to the following publications for an exhaustive bibliography on the artist: C. H. Martelli, Artisti Triestini del Novecento, ADA Trieste, 1979; C. H. Martelli, Dizionario degli Artisti di Trieste, dellIsontino, dellIstria e della Dalmazia, Hammerle Editori in Trieste, 1996; Mercato Artistico Italiano 1800/1900, Catalogo Bolaffi dArte Contemporanea. Colour and light are the fundamental elements of Venetian painting, a type of painting made of a great deal of velatura and of chromatic spaces brightening up or darkening depending on the angle of incidence of the light source. The same kind of effect, those same elements become a source of inspiration for the painting of an Istria born artist who drew on Venice and its secular art looking for the same fundamental qualities in his painting. One cannot but be stricken by the large oil paintings the artist has produced drawing on his own personal universe made up of memories, fantastic places and mystical dreams which reveal, beyond their seemingly non-figurative quality, hidden forms of cathedrals where the light and colour effects are much reminiscent of Robert Delaunays poetical research. In these works the light refraction onto the different spaces in the painting creates myriads of colour shades unveiling at times quiet and calm atmospheres, other times gloomy and upsetting ones. Colour turns into the absolute protagonist of the canvas. It is dense and thick thus revealing the past informal experience of the artist. It is a colour painted through strokes of spatula, in a graffiato style suggesting a hard and long work made by the artist on the canvas before the looked for final result is arrived at. Enrica Cappuccio (1995) Reviews The starting point of Pietro Grassis painting is a vague realism. Visions of cities or of interiors where nothing but a subtle pattern - timidly alluding to a possible geometric interpretation - may be deduced from the square frame of a window or the volume of a building; where subtle luminous marks left by variegated objects, flowers or street-lights, as if recollected from the recesses of the memory, seem to be floating in the milky sea of greys ambiguously suggestive of an evanescent and impalpable space. Grassis painting actually borders on abstract art today, distant as it is from the current Philistine Naturalism of much provocative avant-garde, yet regarded from the public with suspicion and aversion. Nonetheless the public response to the artists painting is one of immediate and extraordinary devotion. Still let us not lay the blame on him for this. We would not do justice to ourselves, rather than to the artist and his public. Decio Gioseffi (1968) The emphasis laid on the emergence of narrative facts well illustrates the freshness and authentic character of the evidence, through a wise combination of the artists pictorial maturity with the straightforwardness of his explorations. That just goes to show that a life completely devoted to art has not deprived the artists confidence in his creative power of its best energy and lucidity… Carlo Milic (1982) Grassi is obsessed with the encounter-clash with contemporary figurative culture, with the need to give his work that kind of credibility which, in a world of temporal values, only stems from consensus. However, real authentic consensus is nothing but the last ring of a chain resulting from the slow and solitary maturation of a poetical style congenial to the artists vocation. Therefore the cycle starts up again and Grassi goes back to painting, thus unveiling to us new and unexpected sensations. Giulio Montenero Halfway between sky and earth, light and colour stand a diaphanous vertical dimension and clotted materic agglomerations - reminiscent of the horizontal dimension of Earth - supporting each other in works overflowing with a strong sensation of freedom of creation and a variety of different yet extremely coherent proposals. The landscapes, the fabulous cities enshrouded in mist, the vaults in full centre and the gothic vaults of ancient palaces and cathedrals, the memory of precious arabesques are just a pretext the artist uses for carrying on a discourse constantly aiming at capturing light in its innumerable and vibrant nuances. Particularly successful are the results achieved by the artist in the opposition between the definite and the indefinite, between the fundamental quality of the picture - marked out by the predominant hue in the painting - and the vibrant amalgam of shiny and warm colour unveiling its heart. The artist follows the model of music whereby the score for a symphony allows the solo instruments to sing out their chant against the precious patterns of the orchestra backdrop. Pietro Grassis painting is timeless, magically suspended between evanescence and proposals for a new Baconian figuration. One can hardly believe how much knowledge and culture flow through the sensitive and self-confident instinct of this master who built up his own world as a self-starter bringing himself effortlessly into line with some of the most interesting paths worn by this centurys avant-garde. What stand before our eyes are therefore paintings from an authentic artist, capable of speaking to the spectator both on the level of poetical and psychological suggestion and on the level of materic richness and technical refinement. The artists language makes each work of art act as the vehicle for old yet live values capable of striking in our hearts the chord of nostalgia and contentment. Claudio H. Martelli (1998) A valid element in the artists production is certainly his constant attempt to achieve more and more refined goals, thus showing a graphic-pictorial sensitivity which is the mirror of the artists exuberant and insatiable inner self. Grassi looks at reality for inspiration yet he transfigures it with the indefinite nature which in art only belongs to poetry. That same indefinite nature which for this artist is the brand of his noble origins. Giusto Chersovani (1960) Source: ArteCultura, Pietro Grassi. © All rights reserved - artecultura.it/e/grassi/
Posted on: Sun, 23 Nov 2014 07:20:58 +0000