MARCELLO BIAGIOTTI


Marcello Biagiotti was born in Perugia in 1940. Fond of painting already in his youth, he was a landscape-painter. Then he attended the “Bernardino di Betto” Art Institute in Perugia, where his teacher was the famous futurist artist Gerardo Dottori, at first in the “Picture” Section, then in the new “Graphic Arts” Section, Pietro Parigi supervisor.
Some years ago, he finished his study and worked as a decorator in the “Umbria Glass-Works”, where he specialized himself in restorations, especially of painted glass wares and leaded glass doors and windows.
In the sixties Biagiotti interpreted, in his paintings, sensations that man feels in himself: his subjects were the main themes of today’s world, from the “ego’s” research to drugs, from ecology to man’s drama, trough a modern open-minded expression tending to give special emphasis to human figure.
In 1968 Marcello Biagiotti met the famous unforgettable critic Virgilio Coletti, who compared his art to Surrealism and organized his first personal show in Perugia, at “La Luna” Gallery.
Giving form to a very personal artistic expression in the national visual arts‘ outline, he created his own style, comparable for pictorial procedure and thematic symbolism to Dalì’s and Tanguy’s surrealism.
In 1984, Biagiotti gave form to a very personal artistic expression in the pottery art: in his studio he installed an electric furnace for pottery and went to Deruta, meeting some important craftsmen.
According to the critics’ and public’s growing consents, he participated in the most important national and international artistic Exhibitions, while many of his paintings became part of prestigious public and private art collections in Italy, Yugoslavia, Switzerland, France, Venezuela, New Zealand, Turkey and USA.

He has always distinguished himself, by winning a series of first places. Among them:

1st Place National “Città di Casapulla” Exhibition
2nd Place “Mastro d’oro - Città di Fabriano” Exhibition
2nd Place “Caramanico - Città di Caramanico Terme” Exhibition
1st Place “Mastro d’oro - Città di Fabriano” Exhibition
1st Place National “Città di Cave” Exhibition
1st Place International “Città di Colleferro” Exhibition
1st Place X° International “ Luigi Vanvitelli - Città di Caserta” Exhibition: “ Line clean drawing; also in the hard execution of a theme hanging between realism and surrealism; where the former is symbolised by human figures, the latter by synthesis and even hanged structures”.

For his artistic work he was twice awarded the 1st Place “Marc’Aurelio” Exhibition.


Biagiotti’ s most important personal shows:

“La Luna” Gallery, Perugia – “Le Muse” Gallery, Bologna - "Il Riccio" Gallery, Venice - "Al Tiranno", Margarita Isle, Caracas, Venezuela - "Trianon" Gallery, Bologna - "Art 2" Gallery, Città di Castello (PG) - "La Meridiana" Gallery, Verona - "Centro Culturale Artistico Aretino", Arezzo - "Mostra Antologica", Prior Palace, Perugia - "Salone d'Arte Contemporanea", Rimini (FO) – “Tesio” Gallery, Spoleto (PG) - "Accademia dei Benigni", Villa Prati, Bertinoro (FO) - 3° Biennale d'Arte "Città di La Spezia", La Spezia – “The solstice’s fourteen”, Rimini (FO) – “Manciano ‘83”, Manciano (GR) - "Expo", Bastia Umbra (PG) - "Fiera Primavera", Genoa – VI Mostra “Mestieri d’arte”, Perugia - VIII Mostra “Mestieri d’arte”, Perugia - XIV “Mostra dell’Artigianato”, Todi (PG) - "Festival dei Due Mondi", Spoleto (PG) – Pinacoteca, Piacenza - "Fondazione Battaglia", Milan - "Fiera d'Arte Padova", Padova - "Euro Art '95", Verona - "Javits Convention Center", Manhattan, New York - "Vicenza Arte", Vicenza – “Trevi Flash Art Museum”, Trevi (PG) - "Arte a Pordenone", Pordenone - “Il piccolo San Michele” Gallery, Sirmione (BS) - "Fiera d'Arte Padova ’98", Padova - “Gaianigo” Gallery, Vicenza - “Cavour” Gallery, Moncalieri (TO) – “Florj” Gallery, Viareggio - “Fiera d’Arte Padova ‘99”, Padova - “Marano” Gallery, Cosenza - “Fiera d’Arte Anconarte 2000”, Ancona – “Il Mulino” Gallery, Gorizia - "Associazione Culturale La Postierla", Perugia - “Fiera d’arte Udine 2000”, Udine - “Fiera d’arte Contemporanea 2001”, Forlì - “Fiera d’arte Padova 2001”, Padova – “Tècne” Gallery, Ponte di Brenta (PD) – “Le lac” Gallery, Lugano (Switzerland) - “Fiera d’arte Udine 2002”, Udine - “Fiera d’arte Padova 2002”, Padova - “Arte Pordenone 2003”, Pordenone – “Giorgio Ghelfi” Gallery, Montecatini Terme (PT) - “Giorgio Ghelfi” Gallery, Verona - “Margherita” Gallery, Taranto – “Art Miami”, Convention Center, Miami Beach (USA) - “Ariete” Gallery, Padova – “Bavaria Residence”, Torri del Benaco (VR) - “Fiera d’arte Padova”, 2003, Padova – “Osteria N°1”, Via del Moro, Firenze - “Fiera d’arte Padova 2004”, Padova - “Fiera d’arte Vicenza 2005”, Vicenza –“Artemisia” Gallery, Perugia - “Fiera d’arte Padova 2006”, Padova – “Complesso di Villa Fidelia”, Spello (PG) – “Altrove”, Sale degli Imbarcaderi, Castello Estense, Ferrara – “Complesso Monumentale di Santa Giuliana”, Perugia - Mostra Antologica “Marcello Biagiotti: opere 1970-2009”, CERP (Centro Espositivo Rocca Paolina), Perugia.


On April 1987, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Guglielmo Marconi‘s death and of the 1st World Exhibition of Communications’ history, Ancis, Confartigianato and the Town Council of Gualdo Tadino commissioned him the postcard’s design for philatelic annulment and invited him to attend the event with an Exhibition of his painting, graphic and ceramic works.

In 2001, a dramatic earthquake destroyed Serravalle in Chienti, Copogna and many other little villages in Umbria and Marche. The Town Council of Serravalle in Chienti and the Parish of Copogna commissioned Marcello Biagiotti the Saint Mauro’s statue rebuilding and the Madonna’s ripair.


Bibliography

“Gazzettino Veneto”, Venice - "Bolaffi", Turin – “Galleria Veneta”, Venice - "Il Quadrato", Milan – Ente “Biennale La Spezia”, La Spezia - "Annuario Arte Base", Turin – “Malatesta città di Rimini”, Editrice Omega Arte, Rimini - “Il Resto del Carlino”, Bologna – “Mastro d’oro”, Jesi - "Pittori Italiani Contemporanei/Il Centauro", La Spezia - "Pittura e Scultura oggi/Panepinto", La Spezia - Casa Editrice "Alba", Ferrara – “La Barca d’oro”, Legnago - "Artis", Brescia – “La Nazione”, Perugia - "Praxis artistica", Rimini – “Corriere dell’Umbria”, Perugia - "L'élite - Selezione Arte Italiana", Varese - "Arte oggi", Cervia – “Arte” Editoriale Giorgio Mondadori, Milan – “Futurando”, Perugia - Annuario “Comed 2000”, Milan - Annuario “Comed 2001”, Milan - Annuario “Comed 2002”, Milan - “Senza titolo”, Bari – Annuario “Comed 2003”, Milan “Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, “Pace” Gallery, Milan - Annuario “Comed 2004”, Milan - “Maestri della Pittura e Scultura Contemporanea”, Edizioni d’Arte Ghelfi, Verona - Annuario “Comed 2005”, Milan - “I giudizi di SGARBI: 99 Artisti dai Cataloghi d’Arte Moderna e dintorni”, Editoriale Giorgio Mondadori 2005, Milan – Terra di Maestri, Artisti Umbri del Novecento, VI 1980-2000, Effe Fabrizio Fabbri Editore 2007, Perugia – 60 anni in Mostra: 46 Maestri d’Arte Contemporanea Umbri e Toscani, Guerra Edizioni 2008, Perugia – Arte Moderna. Gli Artisti Italiani dal primo Novecento a oggi, Editoriale Giorgio Mondatori 2008, Milan – Opere dell’arte moderna e contemporanea, Casa d’Aste Meeting Art 2008, Vercelli – Selezioni d’Arte 2/2008, ELEDE Editrice 2008, Turin – Catalogo degli Scultori Italiani 2009-2010, Editoriale Giorgio Mondatori 2008, Milan.



Enrico Buda, Lino Cavallari, Renato Civello, Mimmo Coletti, Virgilio Coletti, Marina Dorigo, Ilaria Giordano, Renato Lamperini, Paolo Levi, Italo Marucci, Paolo Nardon, Luciano Pandolfi Alberici, Antonio Carlo Ponti, Rosanna Ricci, Giancarlo Romiti, Giorgio Segato, Vittorio Sgarbi, Enrico Varischi wrote about him.


CRITICAL OUTLINES

VITTORIO SGARBI

Marcello Biagiotti’s pictorial research path is consistent and linear. If you draw your attention only on his experimental steps, where there’s always a recurring theme, you can find an allusive and visionary narration. It’s quite clear that Biagiotti is living by his own rules, where his spreading figures and absurd spaces mean nothing but metaphysical processing within a lively and smart creativity. The practicability of elements participating in a mysterious setting, lets the observer’s astonishment grow. You can actually find in Biagiotti’s works lots of cross-references to surrealism, especially the one of Dalì and Tanguy. Biagiotti is able to put in his depictions several mighty visual elements, such as seductive birds of prey, dream-like ships and space vessels, through which, you can escape from reality, standing on the harmony of the architecture. During the narration, the space stretches out to the infinite and dreams come true. Basically, it’s all about harmonic structures, where soft and tender lines prevail, speaking of mysterious events and yet perfectly familiar. You can find in these works hidden relationships with a remote universe, which is yet possible, thanks to cross-references to mythology and fiction. No wonder that Biagiotti, after being a painter is a sculptor too: his pictorial technique is evidently influenced by mass and plasticity. In a way, you can say that his sculptures could be considered as paintings set in bronze. Thanks to tridimensionality, nothing is lost and icons are enhanced. Marcello Biagiotti makes you think of Andrè Breton’s theories about surrealism, without psychoanalytic allusions though. The lack of a precise anatomic construction, creates metaphysical figures, which sometimes become frantic, topsy-turvy dummies. The woman is seen likewise: she’s represented by hair, breast or legs and yet she’s completely unidentifiable, even in her nudity. Back of these women, there are red sunsets or yellow, strange dawns. It’s clear, in such images, the exasperation of symbology, in constant contrast with reality and a “not-yet somewhere else”, extremely understandable in its utopian meaning. As a matter of fact, even if the artist suggests something to the observer, his works’ inner coherence rules, in order to give a clear key to comprehension.
[takenfrom “Sgarbi’s opinions”, ed. by Giorgio Mondadori 2005,Milan,]

PAOLO LEVI

THE PLAUSIBLE AND THE UNREASONABLE

Marcello Biagiotti is an artist of unlikely situations; a surreal painter, who constructs his narrative as a quite illogical stage, unlike daily reality.
He tells us vicissitudes: between irony and seriousness, between plausible and unreasonable. In his paintings we dream continuous figural metamorphosis and visual flights. By different methods Biagiotti creates and elaborates an apodictical vision, a mysterious planet, where men in frantic activities crowded the set, where the sensual joins the existent.
The colour is important in these paintings: Biagiotti’s atmosphere aims at a metaphysical silence. His paintings are full of bright light, the tonality of detailed shades.
Marcello Biagiotti is complex exhaustive vicissitudes’ narrator: he never repeat himself, but all his works interpret a satisfactory travel. into his restless unconscious.


NEITHER ACCIDENTAL NOR HELD OUT TOWARDS EXTRAORDINARY IMAGINATION

... So, Marcello Biagiotti ‘s imagination is not accidental, not eccentric, not held out towards extraordinary. Not even absurd as he really looks for an harmony and criticizes, amid external stimuli and the birth of an inner text which is aspiration at art, a mysterious and yet open building, where men live, like one of those circumscribing a metaphysical, empty, crammed square...

A SCRATCHING INCISIVENESS THAT MAKES US REFLECT

... Biagiotti interprets, with his paintings on canvas, sensations that man feels in himself by using an oneiric language. In his subjects, he paints the main themes of today’s world, from the “ego’s” research to drugs, from ecology to man’s drama after the original sin, through a modern open-minded expression tending to give special emphasis to a human figure which appears to be clear and untouched also in the work’s context, where the ruin of the elements symbolises our own ruin. His canvasses, shaded sometimes by faint sometimes by violent colours, have a scratching incisiveness that makes us reflect.

THE BALANCED COMPOSITION OF SO MANY ANTITHETICAL ELEMENTS

... Some imposing almost apocalyptic sights are the background for his “original” paintings, which loosen up that dichotomy between objectivity and subjectivity, that is man’s life... not generically contemplated, not in his changing continence but as the absolute, as the archetype...
... Between man and light an invisible thread is established, and just in this balanced composition of many antithetical elements Biagiotti finds the right moment to express in an excellent way his extreme sensibility...

APODICTICAL VISION ABOUT OF MODERN THEMES

The Artist - firm in existentialist visions, from which he artistically moves and deduces its anxieties, its grieves to live, trough a constructive technique and themes capable to raise themselves to a free inductive interpretation - creates and elaborates with distinct methods an apodictical vision of usual modern themes... rightly to cause excitability over the themes he deals with...


NATURE AND MAN CONTEMPLATED IN ALL THEIR ASPECTS

For Biagiotti completely loves nature and man, he esteems and contemplates them in all their aspects... Each painting combines figures, forms, objects and streets in a kind of inlay work where reality and idealism blend, completing each other; and the colour, with its calm, cold intensity, increases this harmonious penetration... Biagiotti descends from the ancient Masters, and this is why he has an experienced background as painter, full of imagination, rigorous like a designer, abstract like a poet: from the humbler things of everyday life, he draws, with a metaphysical impulse, tales and stories of an astonishing “unreal reality “.



WHEN AN EMOTIONAL, FANCIFUL CONCENTRATION BECOMES A LYRIC LANGUAGE

... In Biagiotti there are reasons of a steady will to converse with men in the contradictory flow of history... In Biagiotti’s paintings colour acquires a soft, evocative strengths able to let memory live together with immediate perceptions. It’s a psychological and a naturalistic colour at the same time, a colour which becomes an essential part of the expressive transference, of those images where Biagiotti unloads the pathos of his universe, of his figures, of his naturalistic pieces, of his twilight and shadows, which rise from the earth and break, from the canvas edges, into insides and landscapes. In his paintings there are no formal digressions like in the past. There is instead an emotional, imaginary concentration which becomes a lyric language, a filter of every extraneous remainder..



Biagiotti: surrealism of practicability

Being exhibited in a gallery, whose owner has showed 40 years of Italian art, is for the Perugian Marcello Biagiotti, both painter and sculptor, a titled confirmation; a confirmation of his abilities, an a priori out of any forming process, and a confirmation of a ripening due to his expressive philology. Marcello Biagiotti’s world is charming and disappointing and evolves from reality to the mysterious ways of “super-meaning”. He’s able to cloak practicability and linguistic meaning with super-reality.
Not finding references and contextual authorities, is positive for Marcello Biagiotti’s both fields and relieves him from any subjection conjecture.
If you talk about the sculptures Plastic differences, a 1993 bronze, or Power games, 1998, or Vanity, 2000, or other recent bronzes, such as Ascesis, The female, Top model, all present in the exhibition, you can’t refer to Giacomettian filament; the only thing they have in common is the trend to avoid any non-iconic approach, even in the vertical deformation of the physical anatomy. Speaking of paintings, starting from the oil Then came the end, 1971, going through Rising of a thought, 1983, and Logic of dominion, 1998, coming to Ascesis and Nucleus of society, you can’t refer to the historical surrealism: neither Ernst’s frottages, nor Dalì’s adventurous hallucinations, nor Masson’s dualism, nor Tanguy’s abyss, nor Man Ray’s radiograms, nor Magritte’s “lyric matters” and so on, have nothing to do with the formal and self-governing consistency of Marcello Biagiotti’s symbolism.
There’s no doubt on the speculative commitment, crossing over the usual meaning of things; it is also evident a happily obsessive cult of “structure”, at all in contrast with poetry, as meant by Croce, which is ambiguous and tending to mystery and unknown. Biagiotti is however a first-class maker, able to handle pigments, lights, colour and space and the whole mass. You could do definitely do without judgements or linguistic appropriations; true art lives on and there’s no need to wonder why, or how; nobody must forbid the unconditional enjoyment.
When dealing with Biagiotti’s paintings and sculptures, you can join existential and gnoseological issues with a complete soul accomplishment, i. e. lively commitment, you can exactly feel his work’s cultural value and a stressed quality. Biagiotti’s language is free from contemporary figurative art’s one; his communication is new and complex, even in the coherence of the “nice shape” concept, as in Herbart and all the aesthetical positivism; a nice shape, made for creating lasting emotions.
A language made for men, not for ghosts. Among heartless aesthetical experimentations and fool deviancies and whims, I’m happy I could bump into an artist, talented with feelings and uprooted from any pure theory. His works are so clean and clear, that you have to love them. My close friend Alfonso Gatto insisted on the “eyes salvation”, a concept kept in the sculpture Love story of nature and its creatures.



BIAGIOTTI STRONGLY LOVES MAN

Marcello Biagiotti’s painting is a mask of plastic surrealism, changing with flashing lights’ sunrises and with reflected lights’ sunsets: lights, which are mirrors of the unconscious. He abandoned the boring morality and this explodes in such a theatrical form, that it reminds us of a modern Pirandello. In a frantic confusion, the thousand faces of man come to life: a man who loses the enjoyment of his individuality and expresses it in perfectly round nudities, sensual and voluptuous. Women are always there: in memories, in contemporary wonders and even in a future power; they are tall bronze rulers, both in sculptures and paintings; they are naked and in the meantime totally hidden in the artist’s dreamy and intrusive hallucinations.
The Pirandellian provocative and explicit theatre, reminds us of Biagiotti’s brush, fascinated by the mystery of elsewhere, by something which is maliciously hidden behind disfigured laughters and apparent loves: all these are dramatic humour characters.
Freud’s dream theories, the charm of the unknown, the cross-references with familiar objects, extremely symbolic, the beloved literary decadence of XIXth century French poets, feminine voluptuous temptations, are staged in these pictures, reminding of Dalì’s mad shades and they are whispered to the observer through the lively, upset interior monologues, colored with flashing paints.
Biagiotti is somewhat like Pirandello: he strongly loves man, but he’s not content with the surface of things: he wants to dig in man’s inner intimacy; a deep investigation which swallows him and then projects him to the ascesis of ecstasy and clairvoyance.



MARCELLO BIAGIOTTI: ART OF DRAMA AND TEMPTATION

Sometimes the contrast hurts.
Coming to Perugia, finding yourself in an unexpected explosion of light. Biagiotti‘s studio is small, yet full of paintings and sculptures, enchanting in their colours.
Grey, blue, all brown’s tonalities, then red and sunny yellow, weaving surrealist images where shadows strike more than light.
Nature, flash of life scanned like slammings of eyelids which, injured by light, always re-open to look at again. Plenty of womanly, sensual figures, as wrapped in lace and silk, naked, or rather by the Artist maliciously undressed to show all their seduction. Just by that Artist who, pursuing the “butterfly” woman, becomes finally her prey.
Also his sculptures are drama and seduction; a great seduction for those eyes looking at them, when a gaze envelopes them one by one. Deep marked necklines, figures softly covered with impalpable bronze dresses, high supple bodies, almost satisfied to please “at full tondo”.
Art that attains to femininity but also art of more compound, deep sensations. Art of the drama of a man lost in the ego ’s gorges and groping from his birth; a man who - while fighting to emerge from the gutter of existence - suffers in his spirituality a kind of metamorphosis which destroys the human larva, leaving only the sheath; a man destined to succumb in the matches of life to the checkmate of illusions called power, wealth, or freedom. Marcello Biagiotti lives the contemporary events together with men who - humbled, robbed or killed in their everyday life - suffer the violence of our society. Whereas men identify themselves in the complex mosaics of their single lives, Biagiotti can use his universal language even to translate in artistic expression these fragments of reality. He never judges but, like an old historiographer, through surrealist images he sketches in his works human dramas, giving them immortality. And only that love, consumed on the stone where all human appearances ideally converge, by merging their souls, finally transforms and really gives them a new life.


Normal working places:


Biagiotti Studio mobile phone: +39 368 33 48 501
Via Fonti Coperte 38/n phone/fax: +39 75 32191
I-06124 Perugia Italy

e-mail: marcello@biagiotti.it