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Luciano Boccardini

Luciano Boccardini was born in Rome. His father was from Umbria, his mother from Rome. He lived in several Italian towns (Ancona, Terni, Venice) where he participated in different artistic and cultural environments. In his early thirties he moved to Umbria. He lived first in Foligno, later in Perugia and finally settled in Pierantonio.

 

His painting career started in 1970; he introduced himself to Galleria La Luna, in Perugia, where he presented his first paintings. They belong to a “forming and research period”, bound to be modified. Even then, he could master form, to which he paid due respect. Boccardini felt the alchemic potential of colour, whose charm had an impact on the artist. Boccardini was in love with painting in general; therefore he never chose any particular trend. In that period all artists, in order to be appreciated by criticism, had to show an aspiration for “new”, but Boccardini was so much into “his own painting” that he counter-walked the trends of research; reaching an original result.

 

Boccardini is a self-defined artist; his expressive will is apparently only inspired by the great painters of the twentieth century. Line, colour and light are the main aesthetic concerns for Boccardini. Later on, colour is used to highlight forms, thus marking Boccardini’s individual style and desire for magical enjoyment.

 

The starting point in Boccardini’s art is the observation of reality: women, dogs, the dome of a church become painting signs, when transposed from reality to the canvas, meddle themselves with strays of ideas, inner emotions and universal symbolic references. When triggering the artist’s subconscious, though keeping the popular style that identifies him, they transcend reality and become something else. Images are embedded in the inner space and mix up with the painter’s dreams and deepest instincts, thus enabling Boccardini’s representational painting to change and mould things in a multi-faceted, more diverse (yet darker and more inscrutable) world. Boccardini paintings’ apparent simplicity does not cast aside the breach between ego and the world, language and reality, vision and representation.

   

Luciano Boccardini is one of the last painters who may be defined “romantic”. The emotional, symbolic, surreal and pre-ideological characteristics of his art enable a new interpretation of the subjects, which are part of his diverse and interesting selection of paintings.

 

His works are in the Museum of Contemporary Art of Madrid, the Gallery "Il Centro" of Jesi, the Museum of Modern Art of Stockholm, the Picture Gallery of Jesi, the Picture Gallery of Gallarate, the Museum of Modern Art of Rome, the Museum of Modern Art of New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Moscow, the Gallery “Il Cenacolo” of Perugia and in private collections in Italy, Cuba, Austria, Germany, United Kingdom and in the United States of America.

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