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Thirty years of acquaintance with Cagliari painter
Rafael Nieddu have nor diminished the old friendship nor the great admiration
for his artistic work.
Painter,
sculptor, graphic artist and ceramist, he came into the ways of art
through a thorough apprenticeship, right from his time at the Leghorn
Institute of Graphic Art.
From
that time on, his research, deep culture, desire to measure himself
against different techniques, and not only that but also to fathom moments
and styles linked both to image, that is new representation, and to
the informal abstract, led him on tour through the world, with shows
hosted by private galleries and public spaces, giving him the possibility
of receiving the most gratifying recognition.
His
force of spirit once led him to paint in expressionist mode, landscapes,
seascapes, bodies and female figures imbued with warm tones and colours,
traversed by a generative light, almost surreal, that sprang from the
mysteries of the deep, from his uncommon feeling, from that feeling
which is a mark of the great poets. In his most recent works, which
go under the name of “pictofilmgraphics”, the image is as if ossified,
reaching a cosmogonic sensationalism - and furthermore it was under
the title of Cosmogonie that a collection of poems emerged in 2000 from
the presses of Contendium and which revalues all his abstract gestural
painting in which the dripping had his magic strength. In fact, looking
carefully at all the recent samples of these works by Nieddu, it is
always nature, not circumscribed but universal, which lets itself be
read on forex or paper.
Worlds
distant and near, skies traversed by stars, explosions of colour between
impastos and liquefaction stand out on dark grounds. Sometimes these
representations, more than a recall, evoke only emotions, deep and poetic,
of a lyricism that I have been able to perceive and discover only on
rare other occasions.
This
last technique, which iconographically and iconologically recounts the
world, the stellar spaces that traverse the skies, the brilliance of
the mineral worlds, is added to the thousand other techniques of which
Nieddu has shown himself to be a master. I would mention, for example,
graphics in general, wood engraving - one need think of the instruction
he received from Luigi Servolini - where the mark, the strong mark of
Nieddu, indicates a point of reference in the story of this last fifty
years of Sardinian painting. Today his name - not only in Sardinia where
our author and artist has lived, but in the rest of Italy - is known
and esteemed, not least for the human warmth he has transmitted in his
art. And in Cagliari itself he can be indicated as one of the leaders
through his active presence in cultural groups, those which long ago
in the early ‘seventies, we frequented together.
Painter
of skies and earth, painter of life and of the world, since he has depicted
men, female beauty, the generative body of the entire world, the countryside
in general and landscapes visited and loved, but also the primeval universe,
where there is everything and nothing, origin and end, the heart of
the world. And into that heart he has plunged his brushes, recreating
the poetry of life and love.
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