The artist Giancarlo Vitali – Corriere.it is dead

He leaves on July 25 in the afternoon, while the sun begins to fall on the waters of his lake. Giancarlo Vitali died in his sleep at the age of 88 in his house in Bellano, just under his office full of paintings and from which he did not move for life: always been anchored to his timid and somewhat solitary nature he spent his life as a painter in the narration of his microcosm which became thanks to his painting an open universe, full of a universal message, that of authentic, simple life and that he could say with extraordinary pictorial power, fast and fluid, sometimes dense with a melancholy irony, but always irresistible, unexpected, surprising.

Unsurprisingly, his subjects have always been the men and women of his village : f the priest, the wife, the intention of picking a chicken, the village band.Powerful portraits of humanity humble and silent, often forgotten, but extraordinarily alive and transmitted to a time suspended thanks to a painting so noble, that Giovanni Testori defines as a material splendor.

And the painting of Giancarlo Vitali really tells the glories of a sumptuous painting a painting born apparently of nothing if it is for the gift of talent fallen from the sky: sons of fishermen's family , Giancarlo Vitali, he discovers himself painter despite himself, animated by the need to paint as a form of life, as a primary emergency, as an inner need. Vitali, has always painted for himself, only supporting his timid nature, not like those who live in these regions and knows that he is in a marginal place and far from the power of big cities, but especially the privilege private contact with nature, with the silent power of the lake and its storms, with the meditation of the look of the mountains that give a sense of stability, but also mushrooms and chestnuts.

His world was made of simple things: a sunflower, a cat a plate full of fish, a stripped rabbit, the table at the end of a banquet. In a distant text, Antonio Tabucchi traces a poetic portrait of his work: characters and situations of the soul, in transit to unknown places, surprised by the dazzling light of the art. Not the fluorescent light of neon video games, but the one that, as a verse of Montale says, enlightens people and things in an eternity of eternity.

Until the end, Giancarlo Vitali defended the duty of loneliness, of clamor distance. From art and everything in between. All this made it unique in its own way. As unique for its ability to live a single multitude: to maintain itself has abdicated its identity by creating thousands of paintings interpreting different authors. A challenge with himself and the world. A story of a novel. The few who knew him loved him. But he was certainly ignored by the world of contemporary art who considered him an artist of the past.

Something changed exactly one year ago when, in July of last year, Velasco, Giancarlo's son painter and sculptor, he decided to treat his personal history (and the value painting at a time when painting seems to be in disrepair) by organizing an impressive exhibition dedicated to his father and which brought back the title Time Out as to underline a time suspended on the meaning of the painting and also on the dialogue between a painter, a father and a child painter.

Thus, four important Milan exhibition venues such as the Palazzo Reale, Sforzesco Castle, the Civic Museum of Natural History and Casa Manzoni, hosted a first major retrospective dedicated to the 39, pictorial and graphic work by Giancarlo Vitali. Here, the power and immensity of his entire production have finally been made public: a painting that seems to have Goya, Rembrandt, Soutine, up to Lucian Freud as companions, in a hand-to-hand with painting and where captures a life wrapped in suffering, irony, pleasure, disruption, even by an irrepressible euphoria.

For the occasion also an exceptional co-author . Peter Greenaway, wanted to stage an unexpected and intimate dialogue between the memory of where he lived Alessandro Manzoni and the visions of Giancarlo Vitali. To rethink this powerful installation that involved all the spaces of Casa Manzoni and which, among the paintings made in a distant hospital, reproduced a hospital room, everything appears today as a dramatic prophecy, or perhaps , an unconscious desire to exorcise an end that we inevitably knew to happen.

Perhaps, for this reason too, the rebel spirit of Giancarlo refused to come and see the four exhibitions that surrounded his entire existence. And perhaps he had to deal with the fragility of his emotions, under the harsh carcbad of the man in one piece. A few days before the closing, he succumbed to the pressure of the whole family and finally went to the Royal Palace. While going through all his existence installed in a monumental exhibition, Giancarlo Vitali appeared as overwhelmed but to his son, who had worked for years on the exhibition, I did not say anything. Only in the night, in the solitude and silence of his house, he wanted to write the first email of his life, as if to entrust a sacred technology to a technology that said: Thank you Velasco, you also liked my managers.