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DENVER
PUBL C
LIBRARY
R01fi3E
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PIERO
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Recent Paintings and Drawings
Essay by Michael Peppiatt
May 18 to June 9, 1989
gallery
41 East 57 Street, 8th floor
New York, NY 10022
Telephone (212) 593-3737
Telefax (212) 980-0195
1989 James Goodman Gallery
In cooperation with Galleria II Gabbiano, Rome
Photography: Eddie Watklns, NY and Alfio Di Bella, Rome
Artists portrait: Giorgio Soavi
Design: Marcus Ratliff, Inc.
Typesetting: Maxwell Typographers
Printing: Thorner Sidhe^r Press
I AM DELIGHTED to present, in coopera-
tion with Galleria II Gabbiano of Rome, the
recent paintings and drawings of the Italian
artist, Piero Guccione. I was introduced to his
work several years ago by my close friend and
associate. Sandro Manzo. The soft and lyrical
quality of the work made an impression on me
at that time, and continues to do so.
Guccione has been painting since the
late 50s, and in recent years has concentrated
on the environs of his native Sicily and the
Mediterranean. He is a meticulous painter and
draughtsman, constantly working and rework-
ing in an attempt to capture the essence of his
surroundingsthe sun, the earth, the sea, and
the sky. In my mind, with these later works, he
succeeds masterfully.
My thanks are due all of those who made
this exhibition possiblethe artist, Michael
Peppiatt for his essay, Galleria II Gabbiano in
Rome, my staff at the James Goodman Gallery,
and most particularly to Mr. Manzo, for his
remarkable vision and unstinting efforts on
Mr. Guccione's behalf.
James Neil Goodman
DENVER
PUBLIC LIBRARY
VR I9M
(OTYMIOQQUNIYOFOBWB}
H^!
Piero Guccione
THE
WORLD IS circumscribed by places
where a world ends. Scicli, on the south-
ernmost coast of Sicily, is a town where a
civilization reaching back to the Greeks comes
abruptly to an end. On that scorched outpost
overlooking the Mediterranean towards the
Libyan shore, Piero Guccione lives his isolated
artists existence like the last exemplar of a
great abandoned culture.
An exile in time, Guccione continues to
pursue the ideal of beauty that transfixed his
classical forebears: how to give durable form to
the floating, formless grandeur of the world?
What shape should those greatest gods, Zeus
and Poseidon, the sea and the sky, assume?
The poignancy of Guccione s task is that he
pursues what can never be caught: the shifting
dazzle of light on the water, the sky's imper-
ceptibly changing play of depth and shade.
In his own country, Piero Guccione has
become a legend, publicly praised by the
country's leading writers but almost never
seen. Cut off from the world in his Sicilian
studio, he spends months, sometimes years,
on a single image, obsessively reworking the
precise subtleties of its tones until, he feels, it
has captured the essence of the arid mountains
and glittering Mediterranean that make up
the boundaries of his world. Only then will he
allow it to join the works patiently assembled
for one of his rare exhibitions in Rome, Paris
or New York.
Although born in Sicily (in 1935), Guccione
has spent most of his adult life in Rome, where
he first studied, and later taught, at the Acad-
emy of Fine Arts. His work, as he himself des-
cribes it, has traced a complete "arc", leading
from the highly gestural painting of his twen-
ties to the painstaking realism of his maturity.
This development proved so all-consuming that
life in the city became a hindrance. Some ten
years ago. with the eagerness and relief he had
felt on leaving it as a young man, Guccione
went back to Sicily in search of the space and
the light, as well as the time, that would serve
his exacting vision best.
Guccione eventually settled for an austere
country house surrounded by a walled garden,
beyond which sparse fields end abruptly at
a horizon of sea and sky. Those two vast, end-
lessly changing and by their very nature inde-
finable elements are exactly what Guccione
longs to define in paint.
"That's probably why 1 take so long over a
painting," the artist admits. "The sea is never
the same from one instant to the next. 1 look at
it all the time. When I'm painting, all sorts of
different viewpoints, and movements of light
come back to me. 1 think it's the final sum of
these that after months of changing the whole
image, makes me think I might have caught
something of the subject's inner reality. For me,
a painting is finished only when I'm convinced
there's nothing more 1 can add or take away."
Each infinitesimal change of colour that
Guccione brings to one of his marines or
landscapes or night skies enforces a delicate,
painstaking revision of the picture's overall
tonal harmony. In changing one note, he is
obliged to change the whole. This maddening
qviest is undertaken with grace and good
humour by Guccione, whose gentle manner
belies the iron will that enforces such unswerv-
ing application.
"1
need to stay on a subject for
years to find its underlying meaning," he says.
"To my mind, it's when the real and the ideal
come together that you get a compelling image."
When Guccione stares out of his window
at the endlessly changing sea and sky, he is
indeed gazing straight at North Africa. After a
long drought, with the lean cattle huddled for
shade under the carob trees, this dusty coast-
line seems more than ever the last reminder of
Europe. To see it first in the flesh and then
recreated on Guccione's canvas is to be made
acutely aware of the transformation brought
about by the artist's incessant raids on reality.
A great intensity, a stronger, more timeless
presence comes through; this is the sea, the
shore and the night sky that both Norman
invader and Greek sailor knew.
But Guccione's painting is also an art
created and nourished out of art. However close
his vision appears to come to topographical
fact, it draws constantly on a highly informed
visual culture. "There is no end to the number
of artists one admires," Guccione says, "but
Cezanne is the most essential point of refer-
ence. There's Munch, too, who in a certain way
represents the other 'face' of Cezanne." The
influence of Caspar David Friedrich has been
directly acknowledged in a series of pastels
devoted to themes borrowed from the great Ger-
man Romantic. In his recent series of drawings
of Matisse and his model, the homage to the
French master's calmthat precious lull before
the full storm of 20th-century modernism
is evident.
"The sea occupies a space, the wind creates
a space," says Guccione. "What interests me is
to try to give durable form to those spaces, to
recreate them with their own inner structure."
The intricate compositions that result from this
ambition are built out of a mass of sketches and
notes that the artist makes while out walking
on the beach or surveying a chosen theme from
his window. Gradually cill extraneous detail, all
anecdote, is excluded, leaving a single main
theme, conveyed with a magical feel for the
grandeur of the natural world. "Guccione does
not paint what he sees," the Italian novelist,
Alberto Moravia, has suggested, "but what he
wants to see."
Something, certainly, which Guccione is
obliged to see with great sadness and anger is
the massive deterioration of the Sicilian coun-
tryside. Its severe beauty is scarred by cheap,
new buildings and dumps of semi-industrial
waste. A sense of abandon lies heavily on the
island, and it accounts for some of the melan-
choly that Guccione's landscapes communicate.
"1
often have the feeling that we have ruined
things beyond repair," the artist says. In recent
paintings of local scenes, Guccione has incor-
porated bits of black plastic into his paint. "It's
a kind of realism, " he remarks wryly. "There's
masses of this black plastic all over the coun-
tryside. It has, quite literally, become part of
the landscape.
"
Periodically, to escape the long-term labour
that each new oil painting imposes, Guccione
concentrates on pastel. The change of medium
frees him and, since he masters it so naturally,
allows him to catch a more instantaneous side
of the reality the infinitely changing face of
Naturewhich obsesses him. Sooner or later,
however seductive the soft, grainy touch of
pastel proves to be, he will return to oil. It is in
this richly, unexpectedly changing substance
that he best achieves the illusion of having
stopped the universe for an enduring second
before our eyes.
Michael Peppiatt, 1989
1 Mare di Luglio. 1985/87
2 Fine dell'estate, 1988
3 Ombre
suglilblei,
1985/88
4 Mareverticale,
1985/87
I
10 Grande cielo sugli Iblei, 1988
I
13 Matisse e la modella, 1989
M
'^v^
14 Matisse e la modella, 1989
Checklist
1 Mare di Luglio, 1985/87
oil on canvas
33 X 43 inches (84 x 109 cm)
2 Finedell'estate, 1988
oil on canvas with collage (plastic)
59 X 36 inches ( 150 x 91.5 cm)
3 Ombre suglilblei, 1985/88
oil on canvas
33 X 43 inches (84 x 109 cm)
4 Mareverticale, 1985/87
oil on canvas
42 1/8 X 31% inches ( 107 x 81 cm)
5 Vita e morte deWibiscus, 1984/89
mixed media with oil and collage
191 Vi 6 X 255/8 inches (50 x 65 cm)
6 Notte. 1985/89
oil on canvas
42 1/2 X
29 1/8 inches ( 108 x 74 cm)
7 Lajinedell'estate (mare). 1987/89
oil on canvas
29 Vex 421/2 inches (74 x 108 cm)
8 Campagnalblea, 1985/89
oil on canvas
33 X 42 V2 inches (84 x 108 cm)
9 Grande spiaggia, 1988/89
oil on canvas
59 X 383/16 inches ( 150 x 97 cm)
10 Grande cielo sugli Iblei, 1988
oil on canvas
18V8X 451/4 inches (46 X 115 cm)
11 Spiaggia, 1989
oil on canvas
235/8 X 215/8 inches (60 x 55 cm)
12 Dopo il tramonto. 1985/87
oil on canvas
33 X 42
1/2 inches ( 84 X 1 08 cm
)
13 Matisse e la modella, 1989
charcoal on paper
195/8 X 25 1/2 inches (50 x 65 cm)
14 Matisse e la modella, 1989
charcoal on paper
195/8 X 25
1/2 inches (50 x 65 cm)
15 Matisse e Za modeZZa, 1989
pastel on paper
195/8 x 25 1/2 inches (50 x 65 cm)
16 Matisse e la modella, 1989
pastel on paper
195/8 X 25 1/2 inches (50 x 65 cm)
17 Matisse e la modella, 1989
pastel on paper
195/8 X 251/2 inches (50 x 65 cm)
18 Matisse e la modella, 1989
pastel on paper
195/8 X 25 1/2 inches (50 x 65 cm)
19 Matisse e la modella, 1989
pastel on paper
195/8 X 25 1/2 inches (50 x 65 cm)
Piero Guccione
Piero Guccione was born in Scicli, in the province of
Ragusa, on May 5, 1935. He studied at the Catania
Art Institute and at the Academy of Fine Arts in
Rome, where he moved in October 1954.
From 1959 until 1969, he took part in paleoethno-
logical missions to the Libyan Sahara, with architect
Fabrizio Mori's team, to make a survey of the rock
paintings.
In 1961 , at the request of the American Federation of
Art, he organized an exhibition of these paintings at
New York's Columbia University. He had his first one-
man show in Rome at the Elmo Gallery in 1960.
From 1966 until 1973, he taught at the Academy of
Fine Arts and at the First Liceo Artistico of Rome. In
1979 he held the Chair of Painting in the Catania Fine
Arts Academy.
In 1979 he went back to live in Sicily.
Selected Public Collections
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, LA
Museo d'Arte Moderna, Bologna, Italy
Museo Civico di Salo, Italy
Fondation Veranneman, Brussels, Belgium
Dow Jones and Co. , Inc. , USA
EniChem Americas, NY
AGIP Americas, NY
ITALTEL. Milan, Italy
Olivetti, Ivrea, Italy
Banco di Sicilia, Palermo, Italy
Selected One-Man Exhibitions
1968
II Gabbiano, Rome, Italy
1970
Fornl, Bologna, Italy
II Gabbiano, Rome, Italy
1971
Palazzo del Diamanti, museum retrospective, Ferrara,
Italy
II Gabbiano, Rome, Italy
1972
Bergamini, Milan, Italy
1974
II Gabbiano, Rome, Italy
1975
Durer, Bologna, Italy
Arteoggi, Messina, Italy
1976
Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris, France
II Gabbiano, Rome, Italy
Sellerio, Palermo, Italy
1978
Bottego d'Arte, Acqui Terme, Italy
1979
Galleria Bambaia, Busto Arslzio, Italy
San Marco dei Giustiniani, Genova, Itcdy
II Gabbiano, Rome, Italy
FLAG, Paris Art Fair, II Gabbiano
1980
Odyssia, New York
1981
Arte al Borgo. Pcilermo, Italy
II Gabbiano, Rome, Italy
Gcilleria Bambaia, Busto Arsizio, Italy
La Vite, Catania, Italy
1983
Spatia, Bolzano, Italy
Galeria Claude Bernard, Paris, France
II Modula, Francavilla, Italy
Comune di Paterno, Antologta di grajxca, Italy
Galleria Giulia, Antologia di grqfica, Rome, Italy
1984
II Gabbiano, Omaggio a Friedrich, Rome, Italy
Bergamini, Omaggia a Friedrich. Milan, Italy
Forni, Omaggia a Friedrich, Bologna, Italy
Chicago International Art Exposition, II Gabbiano
Galleria Bambaia, Busto Arsizio, Italy
Stamparte, Grcifica, Bologna, Italy
1985
Art 16 Basilea, II Gabbiano, Rome, Italy
The Mezzanine Gallery, The Metropolitan Museum
of Art, NY
L'Androne. Antologia di grcifica, Scicli, Italy
1986
Palazzo Dugnani, Dopo il vento d'occidente, Milan,
Italy
II Gabbiano, Dopo il vento d'occidente, Rome, Italy
Chicago Internationed Art Exposition, II Gabbiano
II Segno, Mostra retrospetttva 1960/1970, Catania,
Italy
1987
II Gabbiano, Tridente due: Senso, Rome, Italy
Galleria A. Boito, Senso, Belluno, Italy
1988
Art at the Armory, NY, II Gabbiano
Galerie Claude Bernard, Pastels, Paris, France
La Senseverina, Guccione 1983-1987, Parma, Italy
Chicago International Art Exposition, II Gabbiano
Galleria dei Greci, Rome, Italy
Galleria Bambaia, Busto Arsizio, Italy
1989
Galleria Bergamini, Milan
James Goodman Gallery. New York
Selected Group Exhibitions
1962
Fiorino Prize at Florence, Italy
Disegni italiani moderni. curator Giovanni
Carandente at Spoleto and Ivrea, Italy
1966
32nd Biennale di Venezia, Italy
Biennale di Parigi at Paris. France
Prize for Painting at Lido Azzurro, Torre Annunziata,
Italy
1968
Prize at Capo d'Orlando
1970
Attraverso iimmaginazione. curator Enzo Siciliano
at II Gabbiano, Rome, Italy
Dealer's Choice American Academy at Rome, Italy
1971
Aspetti della nuovejigurazione. 1960/68 at Palazzo
Reale, Naples, Italy
1972
35th Biennale di Venezia, Italy
10th Quadriennale di Roma, Italy
1975
Fondation Veranneman, Brussels, Belgium
1976
5th Biennale internazionale della grafica at Florence,
Italy
1977
Arte in Italia 1960/77, Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna
(museum show), Torino, Italy
Pittura italiana 1950/70, curator F. Bellonzi, travelled
in Europe
1978
38th Biennale di Venezia, Italy
1979
Nouvelle subjectivetee. curator Jean Clair at Palais
des Beaux Arts (museum show), Brussels, Belgium
Le pastel at Chateau d'Ancy, Le Franc, France
10 pittori italiani d'oggi. curator Guido Giuffre and
Richard Piccolo
1981
Arte e critica at Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Rome and
Marshall Field, Chicago
1982
40th Biennale di Venezia, Italy
1984
L'immagine e il suo doppio. curator F. De Santis at
Palazzo Bagatti-Valsecchi, Milan and Galleria
Rondanini, Rome, Italy
Drawings 1974/84, curator Frank Gettings at the
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington
1985
Artisti e scrittori at Rotonda della Besana, Milan
1986
Paesaggio senza territorio, curator Vittorio Sgarbi at
Castello di Mesola, Ferrara
1987
5th Triennale delllncisione at Palazzo della
Permanente, Milan
Lo Spazio del silenzio, curator Vittorio Sgarbi at
Fiero di Milano
Maestri siciliani del XX secolo. curator Maurizio
Calvesi at Galleria Civica, Enna
Disegno italiano del dopoguerra at Galleria Civica,
Modena
La natura morta neliarte italiana del Novecento,
curator Vittorio Sgarbi at Castello Estense, Mesola
and Pinacoteca Provinciale, Bari
\]