Giuseppe Viola has gone through the most meaningful stages of his artistic career by the power of his strokes and colours. His colours are those of the sun and of the Mediterranean, capable of lighting up instantly like red-hot lava. They come from the passion, disciplined through practice, that harbours in his heart and soul. His subjects are manifold: landscapes, figures, nudes, still lifes. But it is chiefly in the field of research that his painting has produced significant results in the post-war period, or from the 1960s to be more precise. Such was his encounter with Imagism, when his works gave shape to geometrical - as well as poetical - forms of synthesis. Today Viola is an expressionist painter, intent on restyling classical models of private and public history. The latter is exemplified in his representations of episodes of the war-time Resistance, forceful statements in oil, currently belonging to the picture gallery of the city of Melzo. The Milanese painter (but with origins in Palermo, Sicily) was recently dedicated an anthological exhibition by the Milan Press Club, with a beautiful monograph illustrating his entire production in ceramics and in sculpture as well as in painting. The Vatican’s Museum of Modern Art still has on display his painting “L’amore della vita”, a lovely work that was much talked about in the 1970s. Along with Viola’s customary production, regularly found in major art galleries and auctions, there are also works commissioned by public institutions and by churches, such as the panel depicting San Francesco da Paola for the Church of Sant’Antonio da Padova. Many well-known critics and writers, over the years, have given affectionate and learned testimonies on Viola, focussing on the stronger features of his painting, the livelier aspects and the more characteristic traits, as when Dino Buzzati commented on the painting of a pony in white and grey. It is worthwhile to quote what Luciano Budigna had to say about Viola: “From landscapes pulsating with the occasionally obsessive beat of violent colours, to still lifes that can be fiercely exasperating with their incomparable chromatic sumptuousness, to the stark representations of female nudes of absolute emblematic beauty, to the extraordinary luministic intensity of the interiors, Giuseppe Viola comes to us directly, straightforward and uncompromising.” The landscapes especially are imbued with lyricism, and with magic strokes of colour whose flaming tones depict Italian scenes, from north to south, in a succession of seascapes, of beaches like the ones in Riccione or Santa Margherita Ligure, all the way down to Taormina. And again, landscapes of Lombardy, countrysides, the environs of Bergamo, mountain views, lake views, delving right into the heart of Milan, with pictures of Via Cosseria (where Viola had his studio in 1971), but also scenes from Via Col di Lana, from the Naviglio, and the red churches. Viola is a great landscapist, and has poured into his paintings the sunny soul of the average Italian, the spectacularity of events, the very energy of the world and of what is in it. After the landscapes, there are the figures - an endless parade of characters caught in acts of everyday life: a man smoking his pipe, a chestnut-seller, cardsharps, farmers, mandolin and accordion players, gypsies, lorry drivers, fishermen. Each figure is outlined in its essential features, as if frozen in gestures where hands and eyes reveal their true being. The same Mediterranean radiance also springs out in the series of paintings dedicated to Spain and to bullfighting, all based of interweaving tones of red and black. Giuseppe Viola is definitely an Italian painter, fully consistent with that great Italian tradition of realism (or neo-realism) that in the post-war period sought out the basic essence of man and the world, confronting its fundamental aspects. Representing reality as he does with the power of colour, Giuseppe Viola also lends it his own brand of poetry, that observers perceive immediately, as if surprised in paralysing wonderment.
Translated by Interpres sas