Chinnici's Realism
His realism ... is given by the ability to express the daily life in order to collect on the canvas the core of a feeling, of a participation that could be sometimes painful, sometimes nostalgic, sometimes dramatic.
Critics / Press
Chinnici in Sicily
Chinnici lives in Sicily, in a small town; in my opinion, he has a secret balcony in the seaside, the airy and colorful blue seafront that only Sicily has, or in the countryside; I say that because he only knows how to give to the themes of his Art images and truer meanings that belong to the sea and to the people and landscapes of a opulent and sunny countryside. The latest works presented confirm the “Chinnician” rationalism and his conflicting vision of aesthetic conventions, but also reveal, in our opinion, an accomplished expressionist technique that seems to conclude the artistic experience, which began with passion many years ago. We feel perplexed, in fact, in these last works the smooth surfaces and the excessive attention to details draws the innate instinct of Chinnici as interior decorator. This is without considering the artistic limit, however, we refer to other appointments for budgets or new evidence.
The Master of Colour
Chinnici was already a committed painter when, as a youth, the great Salvatore Pugliatti, in a crowded competition singled him out for the award of first prize, encouraging him on an artistic path that would never distract him from a tense relationship with reality, always represented with robust richness of theme and of colour. Since then the artist albeit with characteristic reserve and detachment from the fashions of figurative content has inserted himself in the artistic ambient and has participated in various competitions and followed the artistic debate. I have personally followed the work of this artist for some time and I confess that the comfortable fashionable ways of cold and analytical experimentalism do not attract me, his work is wellgrounded in the history of realism. Today the artist, as observed by Lucio Barbera who has presented him in catalogue, has arrived at expressive maturity of taste in the daily depiction of the landscape and the life of his homeland. His present exhibitions permit one to observe his obstinate artistic perserverance.From actual locations in the Sicilian landscape, (maise harvesters-olive harvesters) to those imaginary (country landscapes-hill roads) where the language is that of creative reality he submits to the seduction of the heart and of fantasy, to the natural melancholy of the Sicilian, to the sense of solitude and to the pity oflife’s fatigue and his work takes life and power, pity and pathos from it. His fishermen, old people and their boats are both symbols of humanity and of myth, his humble people simply waiting for who knows what. These latest works in fact announce a new phase in the work of Chinnici and underline his state of contentment. Of great artistic commitment they have in common an immobile background and are charged with sadness, the representation gives the impression of bitterness and sadness and exalts in colours in absolute tones which endows the subjects with a modern Caravaggio like light.
Energy that the critic Marcello Danzé has singled out in the Eros........one of his more celebrated works, in which the physicality of the lovers resembles those of michaelangelo and the colour, resonant with vermillion, manifests feeling, vitality, enthusiasm. Inevitably therefore Chinnici’s voyage around reality, full of danger and risk, happily avoided, comes to rest at the memory of the truth, at the metaphor of reality, at a type of narrative which goes beyond images and which demands the participation not only of the eye but also of the heart, in a synergy increasingly more intimate and involved between life, nature and art.L.Chinnici
The story of the artistic life of Lorenzo Chinnici has its beginings in 1965, when the highly respected art critic Salvatore Pugliatti chose him from amongst hundreds of competitors for the award of a prize for the maturity and meaningful expression of a thoughtful Sicilian Landscape. Since then Chinnici has remained true to his artistic values whilst honing his skills and pefecting his technique. He continues to regularly exhibit his works year after year. Chinnici’s work evokes memories and takes one to a promised land to which only his pictures can transport one. Extraordinarily his view of the world isolates him from the conventionalism of contemporary art, from physical naturalism and social repression and provides a breath of the warmth of humankind, a screen to display the hard working life of poor devils, to the gloom and charms of the daily human drama.
Chinnici is an artist with a style which is unmistakeably his own, original for the ability to translate his vision onto canvas. Certainly the taste of this artist owes a lot to the mediterranian realism of the great Sicilian painters, primarily Guttuso, but the overall tone of his work draws influences from throughout twentieth century art and from his own life experiences, and the truths which reside in each of us. He creates landscapes, portraits, the flakes of existence such as farmers, fishermen, friends variations of the world of man poured forth from our time, from every time.
The reality between creativity and emotion is thus recombined in the paintings of Chinnici that span the seasons, fashions and time and manage to combine the reasonings of the eye and the heart with an evocative magnetism as only the feelings and expressive values of a true artist can do.The sfumato Realism of Chinnici
Visiting an exhibition of the Artist Chinnici what firstly emerges are the human figures, caught in a moment of essential daily activity, work. Effectively, they are well positioned on the canvas and represent the typical realistic painting fiction. If in some cases, Chinnici paints a past as lost energy, it doesn’t want to mean being conservative. He evokes the past because he wants to let us remember that there is something valuable and healthy, composed of sacrifice, on it that cannot be abandoned to this invisible and paranoid sense. I therefore share, in the critical notes that open the catalog, those of M. Truscello that emphasizes a sense of the author that participates at the wave of time distant from conventional art, social contenutism and physical naturalism, in order to achieve in his human subjects a warm breath. I was actually given the same questions and answers, sliding the eye from one painting to another. I liked most, more responsive to my feelings, the untitled mythical laundresses, the peasant at work, the women in the balcony and the elders on a bench. So he intends to offer (most importantly) on the habitual gesture, a spontaneous tranches of daily life or drama. In this amazing work Chinnici is already a poet, even before grabbing the brush. The “reality" of his work, at this point, is a transcendent reality; because, dedicating him a famous Brechtian concept, realism is not the way things are but how they really are.