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GIANNI GIANESE, LO SCULTORE DEI SOGNI
The exhibition pays tribute to Maestro Gianni Gianese, a recently deceased talent of the Italian twentieth century from with a selection of sculptures and sketches made for film and theater.
Gianese's artistic story unfolds along the fragile boundary that divides an artist from a craftsman, a boundary that, in the Master's case, loses the reason for its very existence.
For over sixty years he has modeled "the dreams" of the major directors and set designers of cinema and theater, both Italian and international, shaping the sculptures that have become the shared heritage of all those who love cinema, the dream, the verisimilitude. from Fellini to Pasolini, from Terry Gilliam to Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Luchino Visconti, Elio Petri, Lina Wertmüller, Franco Zeffirelli.
In theater he has collaborated with Luca Ronconi, Carmelo Bene, Mauro Bolognini, Gabriele Lavia, Liliana Cavani, Giorgio Ferrara, Robert Carsen, Grahm Vik, among others.
Also intense was his collaboration with Italian set designer Dante Ferretti.
He has made sculptures for the Teatro Alla Scala in Milan, the Salzburg Festival, the Paris Opéra, Nanterre, Zurich, and major Italian theaters. Today some of his study maquettes in sections of the Opéra Garnier in Paris are on permanent display at the Musée d'Orsay, others at the Louvre.
Gianese began to working for Cinecittà in the period of the big American productions, when they were building the giants that have remained sculpted in the imagination of many and that he made using the techniques of the best Italian artisan tradition such as clay modeling, plaster, to times papier-mâché, and always with amazing results.
He then discovered polystyrene on the set of a Fellini film "this new, unknown material was being worked on in a room protected from the prying eyes of us curious people who were trying to figure out who these people were who had arrived from outside and, more importantly, what they were shaping. But I had discovered a crack from which we could observe the techniques of working with this new material...."
And in the art of modeling Styrofoam he became an undisputed master to the point that his models possess a drama of rare beauty, equaling the power of marble, its texture.
The exhibition celebrates Master Gianni Gianese through the display of some of the works he created in his long career, some working sketches and autograph drawings.
to edited by Riccardo Buzzanca
He was born to Rome in 1928 from family of Veneto origin. to due to the war conflict, he spent his youth with his aunts in Veneto, in the very poor area of Polesine . During this period he became passionate about observing nature, with particular interest in animals, which he immediately began to depicting with drawings and painting of rare beauty and maturity despite his young age and showing a formidable innate talent. He returned to Rome only at the end of World War II, and his artistic production, made during his stay in Polesine, convinced his family to to enroll him in the art high school in Via Ripetta to Rome, which he attended with such enormous success from that it later allowed him to complete his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts. He began to working at a very young age in the field of decoration thanks to the esteem of his ornamentation teacher who, from immediately recognized the young Gianese's extraordinary talent. During these same years he also dabbled in the creation of comic strips that were routinely published in periodicals at the time. And it is from the second half of the 1940s that he invented the character of Lindoro the beaver published in L'Ometto Pic published by Roman printer Fausto Capriotti. Parallel to his work as a sculptor for film and theater, Gianese also worked on the creation of fountains, monuments and sacred bronze sculptures. Numerous of his works are exhibited not only in Europe but also to Sidney in Australia, the United States, and Latin America. GIANNI GIANESE