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Curated by: Sandro Parmiggiani
The show
From 22 October to 27 November 2022, the Municipality of Reggio Emilia and the city's Civic Museums are promoting the exhibition “Gino Gandini. The feeling of vision” in the Parmeggiani Gallery (internal space 1). The exhibition, curated by Sandro Parmiggiani, presents fifty works by the artist created from the 1930s to the end of the 20th century. Di Gandini (Reggio Emilia, November 3, 1912 – July 25, 2002), one of the most important Reggio artists of the last century, in this 2022, occurs one hundred and ten years since his birth and twenty since his death. It is an exhibition that presents a selection of fifty works, representative of some traits, and motifs, of his path, and of the techniques to which the artist dedicated himself (oil paintings, drawings and engravings, a technique in which Gandini was really a petit maître ).
Works – owned by the Civic Museums of Reggio and by the family of the heirs – slide in front of the visitors of the exhibition, ranging from early figurative portraits to glimpses of the city that was changing in the immediate post-war years and motifs dear to Gandini in the course of of all his activity - the landscapes of the Reggio Apennines (where, in Bergonzano di Quattro Castella, near the Church of the Madonna della Battaglia, Gino and his wife Rina Ferri had a country house built), investigated in the seasons of the 'year (in particular, when the snow cloaks everything in white and silence); the landscapes of the Po, in which one can grasp the call and fascination perennially exerted on him by the Great River; still lifes; self-portraits and portraits of his wife.
Gino Gandini loved to paint en plein air ; Stanislao Farri, the great photographer from Reggio who died on 22 June 2021, a friend of Gandini ever since they had met, during the war, in Bibbiano (where the painter was displaced), often remembered meeting him – during raids to take his photographs – while Gino painted, standing or sitting at an easel, sometimes sheltering from the scorching sun under an umbrella, on the top of an Apennine hill or in front of a glimpse of the Po.
Sandro Parmiggiani writes: “Gandini loved the landscapes of his land, immersed in the silence of a nature enveloped in vapors and light that floods everything and reveals the colors with which the seasons cover what is alive and what stands still and silent: moments in which the person, and himself, the painter – a tiny presence within the great space that one breathes everywhere – finds, in the direct relationship with nature, the authentic truth of being. Gandini has investigated the face of our lands - and of the places, the sea and the lake, which he frequented in the summer - within the changing of lights and seasons, with a sort of photographic slant and with an 'oriental' eye that points to the 'essence, allowing us to finally 'see', in particular our landscape, too often fleetingly looked at without ever penetrating its secret authenticity and beauty. Gino Gandini's landscapes and still lifes are imbued with a latent existential melancholy, and here the painter chooses to synthesize, and render in light tones, the forms that stand before him.
"It would be wrong" - continues Parmiggiani - "to define Gandini as a 'realist' painter: he didn't limit himself to 'reproducing', perhaps exaggerating some element, what he had before his eyes, but tended towards the essential, to research and order, inside the great book of nature, the relationship between solids and voids, between space and form, in the symphony of the infinite possible tonal chords. Since his years at the Bologna Academy, Gandini had introjected Morandi's lesson in formal elegance and harmony of tones, and Guidi's obsession with light, and he has shown that he is not insensitive to other research – think of Nicolas De Staël of the latest paintings, in which the form is nothing but a dancing stream of color-light, and certain results by Roberto Melli.”
The curator continues: “When faced with the works of Gino Gandini, it is useful to remember what Glenn Gould, the unparalleled Canadian pianist, said: 'The purpose of art is not the administration of a momentary injection of adrenaline. Rather the gradual, patient and lasting construction of an inner state of wonder and serenity'. Gandini's works, when we pass by them and accept to linger on them, give us back a way of seeing that helps us build a feeling of vision and a 'sentimental education' capable of grasping some element of the essence, often elusive, of life."
