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The paintings of Giorgio Grobberio are really something of extraordinary for the liveliness of the pictorial structure and incisivity of poetical world. He was born in Aosta, 47 years ago, and it is a pity that so far he has moved so seldom from his region and that he is still scarcely known elsewhere. It is true that our arts system (defined by Argan as our “arts factory”) is powerful and dictates unwritten but tremendously effective laws. If you are not a “fashion” artist, if you have not run along some ways and you have no merchants or sponsors behind, generally you remain nearly unknown not only to the national public but also to a great part of the experts.
These are bitter but necessary considerations, especially when applied to the global work of this artist. However, not everybody has been caught by this play. For example, I read a recent text of critic Angelo Mistrangelo from Turin, who has found and devoted brave words in defence of Grobberio.
Otherwise, I am in agreement with this text, since the lessons and value of a painter like Balthus are properly mentioned with reference to his work.
Indeed, Grobberio also shows those loud and at the same time delicate silences of the mind, those amazements of figuration, suspended between the mystery of existence and the clearness of feelings, which are peculiar to the work of the great French painter, surely one of the most vivid painters of image and poetry of our century.

Here we have a sort of contemporary metaphysics, deeply bound not so much to the detached and aristocratic classicism of De Chirico brothers or, on another side, to the aseptic and meditative repetitivity of Morandi, but rather to themes and reasons, emotions and evaluations existentialist, doubly bound to the poor circumstances of the daily life, to its domestic mystery, to a poetry which comes to light directly squeezed from the surrounding things, which are “simply” in memory.
A “domestic mystery” of poetry and painting... I think this is a definition appropriate for these paintings so mature and dense.
However, this definition knows that the temper of Grobberio is self-standing and unconditioned versus the cultural fashions of to-day, which are bound to the ephemeral, to the play, to the approximation. It is a “mystery” which derives, on the contrary, by intimate solidarieties of mind, directly from the things and their truths, without escapes. It does not want - as a choice of quality - to put aside or elude the authentically human meaning of what surrounds us and the evaluations to be drawn. In the always surprising passages, in the elusive internals, in the emblematic characters, its themes could anticipate the ways of a displacement and a drift of the imaginary which breathes the airs of a certain soft hypersurrealism, amusing and amused in the play of culture and citations.
However, something always intervenes (a sign, a memory of image, a matching, an emphatization or a deformation) which takes the operation again to the barycentre of a severity of other nature and substance.
Something - a “burden” - a background concreteness of the image - which tells the sensitivity of the watcher that we are not in the face of a free or anonymous figure enigmaticity, however exhibited in the happiness of a sure technical virtuosity.
In summary, we are not in the face of a consolatory or decorative operation, though intelligent, versus our to-day reality, but we are in front of a work of digging of a true poet. A work which, in its peculiar constitutional nature, appears to be risky and precarious; but, at the same time, the more precious, the more ambiguous, more dilated, more inclusive. If there is a parallel route to point out for him and his inspiration motives - this of course will require a thought - personally I should see it in the magic Roman Realism and in those curious threads which mutually interlaced between the experience and the one of the “Six” of Turin, in now old years but which left a deep mark on the Piedmont artistic situation. However, it is not philology

which concerns us.
On the contrary, I shall repeat that a work such as the one of Grobberio is important and significant especially to-day for what it is, namely for what he has chosen not to be, thanks to the obvious intensity of his poetic relationship with reality, with the existential problems for the man of to-day. His painting is true, counter-current, brave, determined and complete. Without being moralistic, we have a need of true painting today!
We need it so that the dream and imaginary, Carthusian and cultivated love for the manual skill of painting, the sacred ambiguity of poetry and inside tale, in conclusion, all what Grobberio with a strong personality is here expressing, could survive in spite of all the artistic “auditels” and could grow in the sensitivity of all of us, which is so bewildered by television and fashions, by the flattening of thought and taste, to claim the right of humans to a true poetry.

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