roberto bellucci
Color is a means of representing a reality that is not seen but which is present in everyday life through sensations,emotions, impressions, moods.
From the basic colors an infinite quantity of chromatic combinations develop which in turn stimulate an equally varied composition of sensations which, if experienced intensely, can involve all the perceptive senses of the human being.
ROBERTO BELLUCCI
The paintings are made up of a figurative cue, as a gateway to the picture, and a chromatic development, as a sensorial path to tell stories made of sensations.
As the eye detects details and perceives color combinations, the sensations become deeper and more complex.
The work is conceived by living individual or collective experiences.
These sensations lurk in the mind where an image made of figures and colors begins to take shape.
The image has an evolutionary path that can last a few days or years.
Finally comes the realization performed in a single gesture, which seals the apex of the psychic elaboration of the image.
These paintings therefore represent glimpses of the artist's lived sensations and of the people who interacted with them
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MY STORY
I was born in Rome on 02-04-1959
At the age of 5 I moved to Africa (Somalia Mogadishu) with my family and I stayed there until I was 10. The stay in Africa has profoundly marked my life precisely on the artistic profile. Uncommon human relationships, the harshness of life, the strong sun, the pungent smells have carved deep furrows in my soul.
Upon returning to Italy, I went to live in Naples. This was a poignant experience, and again with a strong sun.
To finish the 5th grade they enrolled me in the Don Bosco state school in Portici. Here at my first encounter with my Italian (Neapolitan) peers and here I am convinced that I cannot understand Italian because the Neapolitan language, unknown to me, was incomprehensible to me.
In Naples I had to deal with a difficult reality. When I reached secondary school I had to choose whether to undertake artistic studies or not. At the time I was already painting emulating the various trends of the period but I was still looking for my artistic character that was as personal as possible. Hence the choice to undertake artistic studies without an academic path that would have influenced and conditioned me by moving away from my personal research.
In 1978 I began my personal technical and expressive journey. I went back to Africa several times, deepening the cultural differences with the Western ones. Life then led me to a job that made me travel the world, to marriage and to have two children but I never stopped painting and narrating my emotions through paintings. In fact, painting has always accompanied me and narrates the natural growth of a man.
Today my paintings, with the use of a personal color fragmentation technique, represent the feelings, worries, joys and thoughts of a contemporary man. As such, these feelings can only be feelings similar to those of all contemporary men.
This is my and our fantastic journey to share in the dreams of our times.
say about me
Roberto Bellucci's art as a translation of thought
by Maurizio Di Leo
In the full form of art as a distinctive element of mankind, Roberto Bellucci expresses in his works the individuality of an existence with color, which becomes the first recognizing element of his works.
Her color palette of him is contextualized in the choice of bright and vivid colors, a symptom of a research he carried out in the African territories, where he had already lived for five years of his childhood (between five and ten years). He tells in an online biography, available on the artebellucciroberto.com site, of his return to Italy in the Neapolitan capital, where he lives the years of his adolescence a little outside the Neapolitan cultural context: we talk about incomprehension of the language, but of so much sun and light, probably the source of its color and a visible point of contact between the African and Italian experience.Color becomes form and substance in his paintings: the 2021 series - always visible on the site dedicated to the artist and already mentioned - color gives life to figurativism in a clear and recognizable way. In the painting Two Worlds, the author places two semicircles in coloristic contrast, in a unique cross-reference between symbol and meaning, which suggests a precise idea to the person concerned. To this, we could add the possibility of the user to see in those central triangles the 'interpenetration' of two worlds, also driven by the sentence that accompanies the card: "Welcome gives us light / Refusal gives us darkness" . The reference to African artistic culture or, most likely, Mediterranean, is interesting thanks to the clear-cut tesserae that make up some areas: a cultural integration that tries to describe primarily its own pictorial grammar and, consequently, its own artistic identity. The author himself declares a well-considered choice of not wanting to follow an academic path, in order not to run into repetitive and influential forms, which would have changed his vision by altering it.In the 2021 series, the Bolla painting once again declares the desire to translate color into form and to give the viewer not only a cognitive reference, but also a personal reading of the sensitive: the text accompanying the work in the card is as ephemeral and fragile as our life ". The color becomes further form and consequently concept with the work Contamination, taken from the same series of 2021, where the artist divides the canvas into fields of action in contrast with each other for the painting technique. The phrase that accompanies him is "The alternative for life is born from contamination", testimony of his personal nature to multiculturalism and his life experiences.
Trasformation belongs to the 2021 series, an oil on canvas where the figurative element appears as a light radiated by a light bulb, and where once again the color and shape give full visibility to the concept of the author who does not need translation to the eyes of the beholder. Here the literary references from which the artist takes inspiration bring the birth of this work closer to the natural concept of the changes that matter by its very nature implements. They are all internal processes, thoughts that he translates into color, shape and explanatory titles. His art is a reading of his mind and his life experience, the art of Roberto Bellucci is therefore a constant search to give shape and color to his own interiority.
Belluccian art also raises the problem of the translation of concepts into figurative elements, in fact it happens for Condanna, a work of 2020, where a green door and two red hands crossed on it translate the thought of a human solitude as something closed in a room, locked in another place, and which the beholder is forced to see from the outside. In the same vein of pictorial action, Abbraccio alla pio (2020) is presented, where the long and thick strokes describe a process that could be defined as futurist, and where the man with raised arms is only a symbol of 'embrace'. In Bambola di rags (2020) he makes clear his vision of objects as containers of life, always through a phrase associated with each of his works on the online site, as if to contextualize his pictorial action and lead the viewer to reflect on questions that probably he the same arises: “Is a rag doll worth nothing? Who would spend on a used rag doll? Yet it is a container full of feelings, emotions, fears, protection, memories. What is most valuable in our life? The money or the heart? This choice tells us if we have a future or are we already finished. "
The figure of the human is at the center of the questions of translating human thought into painting for Bellucci. In works such as Solo (2020) and Evita (2020), the author shows in images of mannequin figures a personal vision of his idea of loneliness and of "A woman who knew how to be the mother of a people And as a mother gave her own life for his children the Argentine people ”(phrase that the author associates in the online catalog card with his work Evita). The elements of human physicality appear in a 2018 work entitled Point of light, which Bellucci describes as a 'touch' along the path of our existence. The translation into painting here is visible in the subdivision of the canvas into these two sections in chromatic contrast, united in that luminous explosion of white color indicated by a synthesized hand, which he - again in his sentences accompanying the work - describes as a "gem ". Anatomical forms of translation of reflective thought, appear in the artist's work as early as 2015 with the Ides of March, when Bellucci reflects on the concept of generations and succession, taking as an example the historical-literary event of the killing of Caesar, and transforms it into an agonizing hand and in a silent act of violence, but nevertheless very explanatory. Color here is also a prelude to a whole series of meanings - accesses, one would say - that the author uses in later works to emphasize some of his issues. In this sense, the work Incidence of 2018 defines the concept of "ascent" in contrasting colors, which is sometimes so difficult to fall back on itself, and which the author sees in arched lines on themselves. In the works, therefore, an attention to the mental datum translated into symbols of the common imagination made with a coloristic and geometric spirit is perceived. Think of Ultimo, a work from 2020, where people are triangles made up of strong white highlights so contrasting with the background that they look like neon.
Bellucci's extensive attention to the symbol is recognizable as a simplified meaning of a question, a thought or a personal reflection on experiential elements of life. His art is his translation of himself to the world, and is accomplished by colors and shapes, but also by tessellated and diversified pictorial materiality
Maurizio Di Leo dr. History of Art at the University of Florence since 2017, and from 2020 as a postgraduate at the "La Sapienza" Specialization School of Artistic and Historical Heritage in Rome.
GALLERY
CONTACTS
TELEPHONE: +39 3381374069
e-mail: bellucci.roberto@alice.it