Roberto Bozzi. Critical thoughts.
15 years ago, while he was flying among waves with his windsurf surrounded by the beauties of nature, Roberto Bozzi already felt the beginning of changes that human evolution was causing to our planet.
He suffered for it but he was also certain that the wonderful strength of nature would dominate: and nowadays he hasn’t changed his mind.
This was the beginning of Roberto Bozzi’s pictorial journey: a new, original, demanding journey. He chose to paint in oils on wood, endlessly celebrating the greatness of nature, the absolute need for mankind to stay close to nature, to create a deep alliance with Her.
A windsurfer to paint, a windsurfer that will have been flying with him among the blue of waves and sky: this was his first approach to pictorial art. The unexpected time to put painting before his romances and everything.
Great satisfactions and widespread consents by people and critics pushed him to go on, trying to improve and to go further (oltre).
“Oltre” is the title of two of his paintings: all titles are illuminating and meaningful of the artist’s poetics and are accurately chosen for any specific artwork.
“In the wind”, “Into the Ocean”, “Sublimation”, “The Life”, “Way of Light”, “Blue”, “Aenigma”, “Light of Fire”, “Red Sunset”, “Charm”, “To the Moon”, “The Moment”, “Away”, “Attraction”, “Light Blade”, “Freedom”, “The two Swans and the Moon”, “Mysteries”, “The Passage”, “Omnia”.
These are only some of Bozzi’s artworks titles that can give an idea of what these paintings portray and of feelings they immediately convey to observers.
This paintings are not the expression of a school, there is no reference to any artist in the past. Perhaps this is one of their biggest merits and secrets: the absolute originality.
At a time when is clear that contemporary painting art tends to repetition, to try to repeat, to "recycle" as its discoveries the formal and poetic forms of valid artists of the twentieth century, or, even worse, to research the originality "at all costs", at a time when there is a dedication to experimentation often exasperated, which is an end in itself because it’s not motivated by deep inner needs and therefore leads to results that leave people cold and often annoyed or sickened for what art can not pass on to them, Roberto Bozzi is going the opposite path.
Perhaps he has been chosen by this opposite path.
Roberto Bozzi creates his artworks moved by his feelings, like a sail blown by the wind. His paintings reveals an intense inner life, a deep culture, with no reference to any other artist. Roberto Bozzi has always tried to experiment new methods and materials following the same pictorial line, formal and poetic, improved, evolved, refined day by day through the sublimation of aesthetic taste, contests and originality.
Exhibition’s visitor, critics and Roberto Bozzi’s enthusiastic collectors love his paintings because they can immediately see what he see, what he feel: and what he feel is what all of us are looking for, especially nowadays.
First of all we need to re-establish an in-depth contact with nature, with the real and magic essence of nature: a symbiotic contact, extremely important for the soul, a contact that mankind has lost during his evolution.
The artworks of this artist are an effort to restore a vital essential harmony between man and nature, between nature and culture. We can see beautiful worlds in his artworks, a clear search for the beauty, the search for the aesthetics of the beauty; fascinating worlds, they attract us, they invite us, softly or with passion, to enter into them and to go through them, to dream, to lose ourselves among endless colours and tonal variations, soft or imperious movements, sudden lighting, blades of light for which we can enter them and we are taken to places of enlightening and pacifying fantasies...
These works bring us immediately, at first sight, to the nature that surrounds us, although they are surely not traditionally camouflaging, and then unexpected, they allow us to find inside them new surprises, properly hidden before but that, depending to one’s sensitiveness, everyone, sooner or later, will discover.
But what these surprises are? Passageways (this is also a title of an artwork).. Passageways, dreamlike transpositions that took us into the wonders of creation surrounding us (these are artworks with an intense spirituality) toward other imaginary or imaginable worlds, always positives, toward endless spaces, toward the discovery of unfathomable mysteries of human life, toward the sublime charm of what mankind will find beyond known natural spaces that are surrounding him now.
Customers say often to the artist that sometimes in the evening, after one of the many stressful days of work, rather than turn on the television they love to sit on the sofa in the dark room turning the spotlight that illuminates their Roberto Bozzi’s artwork and they remain to admire and to dream evoking beautiful images and thoughts whenever new that relax and make them feel better.
For an artist like Roberto Bozzi it is extremely important to hear these phrases. It is really important because they are a source of great satisfaction but even more because he intends Art as something sacred, that must be educational, that should give a lot to the people that should send them noble and positive thoughts.
It must be emphasized that the love of the customer for Roberto Bozzi’s artworks is still very deep, and it is very rare that a person has bought only one of his works: usually customers buy at least three or four, until they get even numbers far higher.
And these are all great satisfaction for this artist, always evolving, but always loyal to the primary, really original artistic discovery.
He is always against the trend, in a contemporary art scene where “negativity” absolutely prevails , where we can see the dissolution of what is beautiful, the desire to always put in evidence the "evil" of our society, even through abstract extreme and often very questionable techniques.
Roberto Bozzi does not want this. He wants the world of Art, at least the world of Art, to always remain as "a clear serene marine island" where our mind and our imagination can at any time find comfort and shelter, be fascinated and abducted to the peaceful transition to spiritual, illuminating, endless worlds…
Roberto Bozzi had several decisive meetings with leading personalities from world culture among which he recommended me to remember how crucial is the one with who is writing.
But Roberto Bozzi has been particularly lucky to meet the professor Marzio Pieri, a very rare person for its intelligence and culture, distinguished university professor author of high quality critical essays. Roberto Bozzi got with him a graduation with honours in 1988, developing as a degree thesis a critical review of a text of Artale, an author of baroque 600.
The in-depth study of the Baroque period, an artistic moment now completely reassessed, it is essential to the poetry of Roberto Bozzi
“E' del poeta il fin la meraviglia…” Wonder is the poet’s aim…
The cult of “wonder”, of the aesthetic and extreme beauty, of the double, of what immediately appears hiding the other one which is however there, clear, that observer doesn’t see immediately, but that he will later surely see and appreciate.
These are contents always very complex and deep so that the criticism has often indicated some references that links Roberto Bozzi to the thoughts and verses of Giacomo Leopardi, Dino Campana…
The range of his artworks vary from those in which figurative references appear to those that tend to pure abstraction. But, if in the first range the figurative element, while crucial and essential, might as well dissolve and not be there, in the abstract artworks where the figurative element is absent, the concreteness of the figure continually appears, disappears and gleams through innumerable resonances and similarities that play with the observer among endless colours, audacious chases of lights and colours.
The main elements that appear in the more properly figurative artworks are suns, moons, sunsets, small figures lost in endless spaces where nature reigns, but where these little figures are always very strong and powerful, sometimes even dominants. Sometimes they are human figures, old fishermen in their boat, but more often animal shapes, dolphins or flamingos (swans or seagulls) elected by the artist, because of their beauty, to represent man’s most spiritual side.
With its abstract artworks the artist is exploring multiple paths, very interesting and significant, coming to realize some carved works, even very complex that besides being paintings are also sculptures that although, as already mentioned, are always full of mediated but immediate, perceptible figurative contents that are particularly charming who has always followed its artistic evolution.
Concluding with a speech purely related to the artist’s original painting technique, indefeasible from already described contents, it is to say that the technique used is oil on wood, with the oils used in a very personal way.
It's a difficult technique, which obviously tends to perfectionism (and here comes again the Baroque), to the aesthetic purity: everything revolves around a skilful use of colour, of matching and overlapping of colours, of infinite nuances and transparencies, of sudden switching and bright colours.
Each artwork is like a world unto itself, a strong world, which points out and claim attention. To maintain order, beauty and perfection in such an "exuberant and full of energy world”, to not create imbalance and chaos, it is necessary the greatest artist’s commitment, an enormous exercise of innumerable combinations of appropriate nuances and shades of colour and light.
"It is sufficient to remove this little nuance," I heard from the artist, "and all the work would lose its perfect indispensable balance."
A masterly technique, the balance, the beauty, the wonder (the Baroque ...), the return to the charms of nature with which we are a single thing, an absolute spirituality, the audacious projections toward fantastic worlds full of deep inner thoughts. His extreme originality in the actual world of contemporary painting art.
All this, and this is no small thing, we can experience observing this artist’s artworks.
And our hope is that he can soon becomes known at the international level, as if he undoubtedly deserves it and his art deserves it as well.
Senator Professor Angelo Rescaglio
