Emilio Belotti is one of Italy’s most up and coming young artists. For some time, his works have been distinguished by precision of form, or better, forms under construction, perfect apologies of clearness of thought.
His paintings, with “outdoor” and “indoor” shots, rediscover the uncertain and the vague, the indeterminate, as if they were possessed by a devil of abstraction. These walls, as I like to point out, these paintings, recall a misty, dusty, sultry season, where shapes and space become a mechanism of light and luminous and metallic intarsia work, an enamelled and mathematical place that upsets man, the body, chaos. Some of his altar pieces or paintings went on show at the exhibition staged in Milan in the Old Church of Maria Immacolata, entitled “Sette Stanze Un Giardino” (Seven Rooms One Garden). A young Bergamo artist who has already made a name for himself at national level, accredited by leading artists and informed critics who have grasped the spirit and the poetic relating to what is great international and American painting. For this type of work, he was mentioned in the Comanducci 2000; not only, he also took prestigious awards, presented to him at Milan and Venice. His artistic commitment takes various directions, from the secular to the sacred, with works, some of which mosaics, in prestigious Italian parishes. To be truthful, Emilio Belotti comes from a family of artists. His father was a major artistic figure, whose many strongly sacred works, especially mosaics, can be seen throughout northern Italy. Such works can be admired in public and private collections in the province of Bergamo as well. What is amazing is how this young artist has managed to absorb not only the most significant Italian culture of the post-war years, when in Milan, Wols and other foreign artists appeared for the first time paying tribute to their poetics of sign and gesture, without forgetting the stain, as a regeneration of the painting that over the years returned to life with the so-called “painted painting”, of which we became acutely aware right from the early eighties. In that wake, the young artist Belotti has managed to sense, evolve and compare his artistic culture, creating walls of colour, walls of shapes open to light that he invades with whites and a number of colours that seem to cover like the architectural design of the construction like tesserae. Some years ago, in Venice, at the Biennial, he took the European Community Art Award, out of a thousand candidates, and in a sense this was the start of his fortunes, later documented in the writings of illustrious critics and journalists and with the support of prestigious monographs focusing on his work. Certainly, the abstract configuration of the artist’s work may appear foreign to some because of certain simplistic choices that appear more easily affected by a handy market; it is undeniable that this painting lesson, which frees itself from the mould of constructivism, lives on a poeticalness of shapes and colour, often bright with reds and greens, whites and blues. This is the work that Emilio Belotti has been carrying on for the last few years, with all possible integrity. Each work of his is a piece of the world, a large window which, when lit up, once again offers us a new world, day after day.