How a painter (Roberto Ferri) is bringing back the beauty of academicism and baroque to Italian art
If You Like Caravaggio, You’ll like this Painter from Taranto
Since the age of six, or five, when “maestra” Loretta showed my class paintings by Van Gogh, Picasso, and Monet, I have been entranced by the world of art. I would spend my weekly pocket money on buying books on artists, or artistic movements, and dream about visiting museums so far away from my slightly closed-from-the-world town.
But I longed for a soil type of relationship with art. A bit like blood, but related more to origins than family. Maybe, a longing that was wishful thinking, as in saying “if someone from here can make it, I can make it too”.
Sure, it will sound a bit melodramatic. And it is. I was that type of kid.
And even though my life would have driven me towards psychology and human behaviour, art will forever remain my first love.
So, now, getting into it: I have already written a bit about Roberto Ferri in my story:
But now, in the lights of events that drove my thoughts back home ( I have very recently lost my grandpa. Ti voglio un bene dell’anima, nonno Pino) I have decided to give more air to my thoughts on the compatriot artist.
I have before written:
I don’t always start explaining my love for some artists via their biographies. However, in the case of Ferri, I feel like I have to, as it ignites in me a strange sense of pride.
Where I was born, Taranto (Italy), many talented people were born as well, and the city itself has lived great times. But not much anymore, leaving the city of dolphins in forgotten corners of people’s minds.
Roberto Ferri was born in Taranto, Italy, in 1978. He is probably the most talented and known academicist of our times. Academicism, with a baroquesque expression, is definitely a dying art in a world more and more in love with more modern and abstract kinds of paintings.
Obscure Light
According to Liquid Art, Roberto Ferri is a key exponent of that Italian figuration that followed in the footsteps of the great Renaissance, and later Baroque, heritage and was able to develop a type of painting that is extremely current but with a classical taste. A genre that, in addition to Roberto Ferri, has Nicola Samor, Agostino Arrivabene, and Giovanni Gasparo among its most recognised and notable practitioners.
Ferri’s painting style is boosted by a method that borders on virtuosity, in which classic surrealist tools are superimposed onto traditional iconographic materials.
The light comes from obscurity, darkness, much like we remember the work of the master Caravaggio. Now, while Caravaggio used complete darkness from which his figures emerged, Ferri seems to prefer some sort of background, flat and opaque, which reminds the viewer that only the character (and their transformations) matters.
Academicism and Symbolism
And a bit of Surrealism.
Symbolists could give form to the ineffable, such as dreams and visions. It is, in reality, a type of art in which meanings are imbued in visuals, similar to some of Ferri’s work, such as Il Canto della Vergine or Narcissus. We can see symbolism used in the surrealist work as well. Ferri seems to be in discourse with surrealism, if not entirely aesthetically, with the use of metaphors and with some of the topics. For example, one cannot help thinking about Salvador Dali’s symbolically strong painting of The Metamorphosis of Narcissus.
Academic art, often known as Academicism, is a painting and sculpture style influenced by European art academies. Academic art is defined as art and artists influenced by the norms of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts (even though Italians did it better, a little like wine), which practised throughout the Neoclassicism and Romanticism phases. The scholarly impact may be seen in Ferri’s work. Surprisingly, many of my childhood classmates attended the same art high school/academy as Roberto Ferri, but no one has his skill.
Sure, I have a very brilliant relative who went to the same school as Ferri but in a different city, but he paints nothing with a classic influence.
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