Postcards from life
At first glance, we see an atmosphere of fun, holidays, travel, light-heartedness, joy, love, and youth.
One painting is filled with the faces of laughing young women, friends, captured in a moment between childhood and entering adulthood; when the latter still appears only as absolute freedom, independence from the family home, imposed norms, rules, prohibitions, and obligations. In another, a young man leans over a terrace railing, looking at the city in from of him. Wearing only jeans – he hasn’t even put on a shirt, he’s just arrived, by hitch-hiking or by train, to another city on the map of his holidays, and jumped in the shower. In a moment, he’ll head out into the city streets, to sightsee, explore, lose himself in a new place; perhaps some new-found friends will take him to a party, perhaps he’ll experience a thrilling romantic adventure. Another painting: two friends, sticking their heads out through open car windows, the rush of the air ruffling their hair. They feel strong, wonderful, removed from everyday reality, immersed in their journey, in being on the road. Anything could happen.
Cristiano Piccinini’s paintings carry the illusion of a postcard. Yes, illusion. The beautiful young bodies, the intimate scenes, the close-ups of lovers, the idyllic landscape contain nostalgia and melancholy, and sometimes even the horror of stories about the fragility of the self, the fragility and transience of moments and life. Everything that seduces us in these paintings – freshness, innocence, and sensuality – is an invigorating memory of youth. It is only that this memory is already overlaid with the filters of the successive stages of life, experiences, and crises. It is oh so easy to make an analogy with Bernard Bertolucci’s film Stealing Beauty, with it postcard frame aesthetics, with its ode to youth, longing for youth, examining youth from the perspective of maturity and ageing, with its premonition of inevitability and ending, with its impossibility of returning to old experiences, expectations, desires, and emotions.
Cristiano Piccinini’s paintings always have their beginning in a stranger’s photograph, in someone else’s experience. He does not come up with the subjects himself; he draws them from photographs taken by other people. On his phone or computer, he browses for hours through the collections of Flickr, where professional and amateur photographers upload their images. “I don’t paint images created by my imagination. I choose them like in an audition, like a tourist who chooses to look one way and not the other. Sometimes I look at thousands or millions of photos before I choose one,” he explains his working method, and adds, “I feel a bit like shopping in a supermarket: I choose the pictures that are on ‘internet shelves’ and I consume them. When you go shopping, you don’t buy what catches your eye first. I look for images in which I recognise myself, or in which you can see the collective identity. What do all the people on this planet have in common?” Once he finds a shot that interests him, when the frame intrigues him, stops him, touches a chord of emotion in him, activates a system of associations, then he enlarges it, turning it in all directions; he wants to paint. He finds himself in someone else’s self, and suddenly a stranger’s shot becomes personal, and perhaps even universal.
Cristiano Piccinini wants painting to be close to life.
His studies at the University of Bologna in the painting studio of Prof. Concetto Pozzati took place in the first half of the 1990s, when conceptualism reigned in Italian art. Painting, let alone oil painting, was passé. Discouraged by the retreat from the traditional medium, the young artist quickly entered the world of advertising. Working for clients at major advertising agencies taught him, on the one hand, that communication must be direct, that one must speak in a straight-forward manner; it cleansed his way of thinking of philosophies, metal levels, context, elitisms, and, on the other hand, deepened his fascination with the human being, its relationship in the world, in the broad spectrum of phenomena and connections. He considers painting the human figure to be the greatest challenge.
The artist’s move to Poland was not without his significance for his paintings. He observed with interest the fresh phenomena in Polish art, the appearance of the Ładnie Group artists – Wilhelm Sasnal, Marcin Maciejowski, Rafał Bujnowski, Jarek Firek, and Józef Tomczyk – who took the subjects for their paintings from banal everyday life, newspapers and television, and drew from the aesthetics of kitsch and advertising. In Italy, socially engaged art did not exist. Piccinini also discovered the classics of Polish art – he considers Witkacy to be a brilliant artist, and he is captivated by Wyspiański’s subtle expressionism.
Spotting an intriguing photograph on Flickr is only the start of working on a painting. After all, transposing it into an oil painting is not a mechanical copying process, because Cristiano Piccinini treats the photo only as an impulse, a subject he strips of redundant details, distils it, and filters it through his own emotions, marking it with a painterly gesture. He emphasises that in each photograph and in each painting, he seeks life and death, joy and sorrow, mystery and banality, the moment and eternity. His paintings are ambiguous, saturated with content, a constant reflection on the mystery of life.
