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GIAN BERTO VANNI
Adjunct Professor
"Voyage Through Lacquer and Jades," oil and gold leaf on canvas, 32" x 54", 2002
(click on image for larger view)
Gian Berto Vanni has taught Color and Painting Techniques at the Cooper Union School of Art for twenty years.
"An empty canvas. The first gesture opens one door, closes the others, begins to embody the original idea, vague yet precise like unwritten music. The colors run freely creating boundaries and affinities. Chance and instinct feed the imagination.
Chance? The pigments running in rivulets that blend, divide, gather in a puddle or break in a hundred dots are driven by unavoidable laws of nature: gravity, friction, absorption. It is at this point that I let my rational self intervene, eliminating whatever does not fit the image of my mind.
I use control and improvisation in different steps, questioning the messages sent by the original impulse that becomes the keyword to the visual itineraries, where the elements of the composition attract or repel one another, vague as clouds or sharp as crystals. The painter orchestrates the vision, acting as a guide through the visual paths he created. Then the real subject reveals itself: landscapes of the mind that mix and transform different moments in time each carrying its own truth, surfacing again with another meaning in a different world.
The media submerge us with images that never before had been shown together. They were the product of cultures that had no contact with one another; we are challenged to use different visual vocabularies to really "see" what we look at. My paintings use discontinuity to counterpoint parallel worlds, underscoring the relativity of systems that hide under their surface the unity of the laws of nature. I use a multi-lingual, eclectic dictionary that lets me insert allusions to other cultures, quotations from other styles. I saw old frescoes crumbling to pieces, uncovering older frescoes beneath; ivy hiding Ionian capitals and columns, creating harmonies unforeseen by the ancient creators. I am convinced that these contaminations of opposites through space and time represent life itself, with our possibility to believe in something, and the opposite of it. We accumulate experiences, habits, we absorb different cultures, affections... and we realize that life is not that simple, to be interpreted and conceived under a single unifying banner..."
A retrospective of Gian Berto Vanni's work was published on DVD by The Cube, Modena, Italy, in 2004.
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