ALESSANDRO CIANTELLI
Alessandro Ciantelli was born in Pistoia . Since the 1960s, he worked intimately within this city's artistic discourse. This context has characterized Ciantelli’s development of his artistic language, which transposes from reality fragments altered by a pictorial materiality and an accentuated chromaticism abstracted from the light/amber effects a naturalistic vision through. Since the 1990s, his relationship with the countryside and rural life – with which Ciantelli is acquainted and perhaps mourns – has been increasingly sublimated. The dense pictorial jumble of his works still evokes hilly silhouettes or ears of husked corn, yet they achieve an expressiveness bordering on an informal highly reminiscent of Molotti's artistic maturity. Images no longer re-emerge from a rural world "committed to memory", but instead come from materials like plaster scratchings or the evocative power of commonplace surfaces worn by constant use or the changing rhythms of the seasons. Here is the meaning of compositions that, since the beginning of the new millennium, are purely based on cadenced geometric spaces on which, still bearing figurative allusions, monochromatic graffiti and the gestural expressiveness of color coexist in a union of material solidity. Ciantelli does not just depict pathos-filled fragments from real life, but patiently builds a rhythmic order that suggests a web of associated ideas (by images) where past and present coexist; where history (even that of the art evoked by gold leaf) helps us to reinterpret reality; and where humankind, nature, and artifice coexist in an unstable yet endlessly recreated equilibrium.
Numerous his personal and collective exhibitions in Italy as well as in France in Paris, in Germany and in the Netherlands in Amsterdam.
[Roberto Agnoletti]