Luciano Chinese
By the Art Critic
Toni Toniato
Alfonso Gatto
Luciano Chinese is an artist who entered the international scene a few
years ago, although his vocation for painting had never flickered, not
even when he left his studies, first at the Academy and later at the
University of Architecture in Venice, because he was forced to dedicate
his time to other activities in order to make a living. Nevertheless,
these activities were always in the same field and he was able to
promote and organise important cultural events, subsequently opening
art galleries in towns in the Veneto and Friuli areas, the latter being
the land of his birth, and through which he has introduced and promoted
worthwhile Italian and foreign artists.
Already known for these merits, when he returned to his ever more
pressing original vocation, which he has pursued since the
nineteen-eighties with increasing continuity and variety in his work,
insufficient attention was paid to the value of his pictorial efforts,
rightly demanded since they were owned and displayed by prestigious
museums. The many intellectual interests that he has continued to
cultivate have not therefore encouraged a more committed and widespread
critical response to his creative work or, more precisely, it was not
perhaps considered that the artist needed such authoritative
confirmation. In spite of this, in recent decades Chinese has managed
to travel, with his researches, an experimental inclination of
considerable weight, directing his expressive language in a direction
that combines new etymons of colour and space, even using recovered
materials particularly glass in order to attain further effects of
luminous reflection with intriguing visual proposals.
The years spent in Venice, between 1956 and 1970, in contact with the
spatialist group have clearly influenced his work, already marked by
elegant imaginative proposals in the wake of a cosmologism variously
conjugated, at the time, by certain protagonists of the first and
second wave of Futurism, by Balla and then by Fillia and Crali, onto
whose imprint the harmonic and vibrant matter of his pictorial images
and the successful depiction of other "possible worlds" have fecundly
grafted.
It seems in any case certain that the artist?s imagination tends to
move between vital instances from informal poetics ? the strong
material gestuality of his ?reliefs? ? and the urgency of a fantastic
dreamlike expansion in a determinant cosmic-spatial projection that has
allowed him to correspond in the same manner with the creative
stimulating formulations of Lucio Fontana. Rather, this last reference
has shown to be anything but occasional, because certain imperious
proofs especially on the instrumental plane, immediately evident in the
more recent works, directly recall the experimental practices already
used with extraordinary inventiveness by the founder of the Spatialism
Movement. And not only for the use, also by Chinese, of glassy
materials, of silvered and gilt blades, but for the formal execution,
in particular those relating to the almost analogous construction of
rotating globular elements on the surface, drawing vast orbits,
eccentric movements, segnic constellations of elegant spatial
structuring.
The basic elements of Chinese?s linguistic repertory thus result
subsumed by these various sources, which have substantially inspired
him to carry forward a conception of abstraction that is both geometric
and lyrical, of constructive rigour in a certain sense Cartesian and of
expressive freedom, disciplined only by a seductive fanciful
inspiration, thus opening his pictorial vision to exhilarating hues, to
turbulent linear rhythms that race along with the relentless impetus of
energetic flows on the panels of the surfaces.
In the compositions there is a dominant yearning for the absolute, a
powerfully expressed urge to manifest an idea of infinitum that the
artist in a certain sense clearly postulates, by depicting, through the
orbital evolution of numerous geometric bodies, spheres, ellipses,
spirals, shapes of a sublime cosmology that would seem to refer to the
allure of the revolutionary speculative hypotheses of Giordano Bruno,
but which in effect, does not lie outside the safest theoretical
elaborations supplied, nowadays, by quantum physics.
The geometric finite of these spatial bodies, on the other hand, come
within the short circuit with the infinite adimensional of the basis,
so that it seems as though Chinese intends, here to mime or simulate a
gesture of overcoming the surface that in Fontana is presented with the
radicalism of a physical theft and as a threshold of a truly real
elsewhere. In Chinese that gesture assumes instead a precise symbolic
significance or, rather, it is configured as a metaphor of painting as
a universe in expansion, attempting nonetheless to overcome the
futurist pretence of representing it mechanically, but also of evoking
the complex and mysterious formation in a purely revealing transcending
of light-colour, such as we find in the phantasmagorical resolutions of
the Venetian spatialists. On the other hand, Chinese's pictorial
investigation is of a more empirical than eidetic nature, rather also
the use of the glassy materials connects, in effect, to the Byzantine
tradition of the mosaic artists of the San Marco cathedral, which he
studied as a student at the Academy.
A few decades later, the artist therefore returns to the memory of this
knowledge and to the turbulent parabolas of the lines and the circular
geometries that marked his previous paintings lyrically abstract now
grafts on these mirrored relics, pieces of mosaic, rejected fragments
from the kilns of Murano, further elements of an imaginative alchemy
that he has brought to sublimate the imaginative acrobatics of the
aerial and almost intangible matter of his forms.
In any case, Chinese has always acted on different linguistic and
instrumental repertories, first fascinated by the slender threads of
Alexander Calder and by the eurhythmic geometrics of Luigi Veronesi as
can be seen from paintings such as "Evento Spaziale" [Spatial Event]
from 2006 and "Architetture Spaziali" [Spatial architectures] from the
same year, which even re-proposes in a renewed version the typical
abstract-concrete lexis but at the same time he is oriented to pursuing
a singular process of approach to the experimental problems of Fontana
and within these references and comparisons has matured with time an
increasingly independent expressive conception.
Matter, form, space in fact represent the principal terms of this
structural development of the image that not only uses extra-pictorial
means, mirrors, wires, wood objects found lying about but also enriches
the visual paraphernalia of the artist with his efficacious use of
enamels and industrial resins, adapting these chromatic resources to
the need to conquer extreme degrees of transparency and luminosity. And
while works such as "Oltre il Sogno" [Beyond the Dream] from 2001,
"Ritmica" [Rhythmic] and "Sognare di Nuovo" [Dream Again] from 2002
confirm the debt that the artist agrees he owes to Fontana, with the
later acrylics the severance from the experiences of the admired model
who in any case remains unequalled will be shown to be net and
definitive. In any case, in his own way Chinese distances himself from
every objective excess in the material relief, form the plastic
redundancy of the medium, even where virtually translated, in the case
of Fontana, into a radical conceptualisation, aiming vice versa to
deploy his specialist vision within the same pictorial phenomenology.
He essentially tries to figure an architecture of colour through a
movement of progressive tone-colour undulations, of vectorial bands
that furrow the latitudes of the picture, radiating in curvilinear
projections along the edges, thus producing gravitational tensions from
one extremity to another, as we can see in "Evento Spaziale 5" [Spatial
Event 5] from last year.
We must therefore register at least two stylistic methods that
substantially contribute to the shaping his process of abstraction,
characterised by a dominant chromatic manifestation, from a pervasive,
effusive colour-light, that expands and overflows in parabolic or
elliptical movements in space, twisting or spreading in successive
twirls around a gestational formal nucleus, original cell of a luminous
proliferating emanation, the other instead is marked by the preference
for homogeneous colour, uniform or just vibrated on the same tonal
register, light or dark on which the artist prepares to act with
abutting elements, materials ?found? revived with allusive calculation
and with different functions, equally emblematically surprising.
In fact, Chinese's action is now directed towards a dimension that
tends to overcome the merely illusionary condition of the pictorial
surface, consequently aspiring to expose itself to the outside, to
leave the borders of the picture, to become concrete experience of the
real space, reaching a physical morphology, a volumetric consistency
that preludes to a constructive plasticity, inducing the relative
geometric structures to flex according to a totalising chromatic
dynamism. This research is then collocated, beyond the chilly
objectivity that more properly belongs to the sphere of the conceptual,
similarly distinguishing itself from the excited and visceral
materialism of the post-informals, proposing on the contrary, a
sometimes sensuous unfolding, perceptibly corporeal, at times ideal,
fantastically imagined, alternating in logic relation accents and means
with which the artist every time manages to orchestrate and modulate
the enigmatic luminous theorems of his spatial theorems.
He realises, in effect, a concerted association between Cartesian
spirit "conceptual and geometric rigour" and imaginative freedom
"purely lyrical expressivity" combining these faculties in a process of
synthesis, in a formal reduction of admirable simplification, leaving
nothing to chance, but returning every element of the compositive
syntax to the reasons of an interior order, to the need for a deeper
harmony where the mystery of creation truly rings out. Something
originally sonorous surfaces from the rhythms of his sidereal
architectures, something that transcends the matter of the merely
visual and that goes beyond the presumed absoluteness of perception and
depiction, thus indicating other places to listen in order to capture
and transmit a sense of the obscure, perhaps what animates and what can
animate new worlds of nature and imagination.
For Chinese the movement of the forms is identified with secret musical
cadences, he poetically intuits the structural articulations that he
then translates into chromatic sequences, in splendid linear
developments, in volumes of air and light, in crystalline
phosphorescent reflections: projectual magics that can only be born of
the instances, irresistibly utopic, of a desire to show beauty in
itself and for itself.
The work of the artist will therefore focalise in the latter years
around these themes of the need to visualise, as far as possible, the
secret natural symphony that inhabits the universe, allusively
configuring sinuous trajectories of spatial forces, revealing unusual
luminous events, instituting refined scales of tones and timbres, in an
ever fluid and dynamic equilibrium, always in the elementary
constructive scanning of the geometric weaves that regulate and
plastically weld it to the structural framework or, rather the icastic
architecture of the image. However, Chinese is careful not to yield to
suggestions of semi-scientific story-weaving or to allow himself to be
carried away by the perils of a magmatic dreamlike impulse. On the
contrary, he analyses and meditates with coherence and rigour on the
possible, if improbable, formal analogies between objectified
revelations by experimental physics and foreboding explorations of the
artistic imagination. On these traces then he leads his expressive
soundings, hazarding personal paths of investigation through the
polyform matter with which the various "reliefs" are composed, the
variegated constellations of his chromatic urographs, the topological
diagrams and the mercurial liveliness of an ever-artificial spatial
construction although motivated by a singular cosmo-luminological
formulation.
In fact, little relates it to Spatialism although he believes that he
recalls it every time he deals with the problem of the dimensions of
the beyond, of the digression from the flat surface with the aim of
withdrawing from illusionism "more or less apparent" of pictorial
plasticism, to access the unstable perspectives of the real flows.
Nonetheless, his creative experience tends to identify itself, not only
symbolically, with a process of visionary transfiguration that also
incorporates the reality of the physical space. The operation that the
artist intends to conduct effectively aims to define a geometry of the
mind, to return to the perception of things and nature the statute of
an interior order, of a rationality, however non-abstract, but
accomplished with the lucid consciousness of aspiring to hear with
reflected poetic intensity the harmony of the "higher spheres", in a
space not only symbolic and not even in an insuperable transcendence,
but in the places and in the concrete moments of an existential and
imaginative adventure, both necessarily driven to converge in the same
reverberating dimension of the here and elsewhere, of the commensurable
and the inexplicable, of the contingent and the totality. The
imaginative vis of these cosmological maps by Chinese, the traces of a
formative genesis of possible universes for significant conceptual
schemes, summaries of a figuration for which states of mind, secret
moods, profound emotions count above all, leap forcefully forth without
any references lent from the external world and from unnatural
surrealism, either of a conceptual or of a dreamlike quality.
A decisive change in the search for a language of the individual formal
purity, although contaminated by pictorial and extra-pictorial
materials, between the diaphanous transparencies of the flowing
stratums of colour and the dense layers of mineral consistency, between
surface and relief, between bidimensionality and tridimensionality,
with which the artist engages a dialectic confrontation, but of
essential expressive vitality, since he tends with this to dismantle
the conventions of these opposing categories of representation,
convinced that the space of the artistic reality must in any case
remain the product of an effective invention of image, i.e. it must
give form to the original idea.
The principal intent of the artist, therefore, consists of showing that
continual and continually diverse passage between the perception of the
external of the objectivity and the interior reflection, a movement
that his work inscribes in the determination of a specular process of
image. Perhaps this is why he cannot fully share the conceptual
radicalism of Fontana, but also avoids allowing himself to be enwrapped
in the objectualism of "environmental" art, by the omnivorous
installative strategies proposed by the aesthetics of a new and
overflowing diction of "realism" in a key of ostentatiously mimetic
exercise on the side of bio-anthropology and prevalently playful and
functionally spectacular pasting. Chinese on the other hand follows
with constant faithfulness the parabola of his imaginative investment
in the inexhaustible resources of painting, composed primarily of a
daydream experience and of the cultural stimuli most congenial to him,
unfolding a necessitated process of stylistic investigation such as to
lead him to renew the syntactic trim and the material instruments of
the current formulations. Almost a new beginning that he initiated with
the works of the last five years, from the second edition of "Sognare
di Nuovo" [Dream Again] from 2000 (a painting-collage composed of
crooked geometric projections and a piece of glass at the top, in the
centre and diagonally traversed by a red wooden rod) to the praised
spatial kinetic of "In direzione dell'equilibrio" [In the Direction of
Equilibrium], from 2004, to "Elicoide Cosmico2 [Cosmic Helicoid], from
the following year, displayed at his personal exhibition in Barcelona
and "Oscillazioni Gravitazionali" [Gravitational Oscillations] from the
end of 2006, culminating in the synthesis of the visionary elements of
a spatial hyperuranus of colour and light.
On the often teeming need of these formal and thematic variations, he
concentrates the consequence of the cosmological iconography not only
on the plane, now, of the symbolic references, although unconnected to
the stereotypes of the heirs of Spatialism, but alien also from the
dark spells of an enduring informal surrealism. Also the new images are
focused derivations of the complex historical climate of abstractism,
born of the same ideological womb, conjugated in the manner of a visual
pronouncement that parallelly draws on a personal reverie, cultivated
with obstinate firmness, precisely because it supplied the artist with
the archetypes of a more emblematically cosmological figuration, to the
point where it involves the openly objectual establishment of modern
plastic constructions.
Chinese placed before the intersection of an equally clamorous exit
from the painting attempts to circumvent the obstacle, preferring to
aggregate in a non-aleatory combination of heterogeneous materials, to
be used for the reasons and the meanings of the pictorial
conceptualisation of a project of a figurative elaboration that in
painting finds its true raison d'être, that which mysteriously
surged from possible worlds of visions that could not otherwise
manifest themselves.
Chinese?s visions reverberate then in movements of imaginary astral
bodies, figuring deviant rotations, perspective links and chromatic
brilliance, scores newly opened at looming meanings, on fragrant
sonority that equally belongs to the magic of painting. But above all,
they cross the canvases and the boards of the colours of his land ? now
gentle, almost evanescent, now bright, strongly marked ? paintings that
seem to flaunt the signs inflicted by the artist, powerful allusions to
the insidious karstic slashes, and that show the sudden breaks in the
plane and the extraneous superstructures, contaminations of hybrid
physicality, disoriented assemblies, sharpness and suavity, contrasting
plastic grafts and flowing lyrical surges. Although in the varied
stylistic tangency and the noticeable loans from known examples of
artistic experimentation from recent years, methods and accents that
should be carefully highlighted in the progressive development of
Chinese?s work, it is above all important to indicate the effective
range of the qualities personally expressed in his work, of the
propositions he introduces in the direction of a sharp sensibility and
a critical awareness of the values of modernity.
Biography
The mother was the daughter of an chair manufacturer, she was cultured but, being a woman, was forced to renounce her studies and work as a factory hand in her father’s business – nonetheless she sent her oldest child, Mario, to study in Venice. When he was five years old, Luciano Chinese left Gorizia for Grado and when he returned he felt somewhat estranged… He attended the local junior school and amongst his classmates was Dino Zoff, with whom he maintained a friendship.
Luciano’s education followed the example of his mother, a simple but sensitive woman, who developed various interests in art and culture, in fact it was his mother who encouraged him to choose artistic studies. At the age of thirteen, therefore, he moved to Venice to attend the State Artistic Lyceum. He would later take his high school diploma at the Artistic Lyceum, with the intention of studying architecture at university, but his precocious vocation for painting convinced him to take a diploma at the Academy of Fine Arts, under the guidance of the maestro Bruno Saetti.
While still a student, with Mario Botta, he joined the work group in the course authoritatively held by Carlo Scarpa and, later, he attended the extraordinary lessons held in the summer session by Emilio Vedova at the Salzburg Academy.
While he was studying in Venice, he came into direct contact with the local intellectual groups and made the acquaintance of important Italian and foreign personalities. At that time, the city was enjoying a period of great transformation; the international importance of the renowned cultural centres such as the Biennale, the Giardini and the new “Giorgio Cini” Foundation on the island of San Giorgio, which periodically held major events, attracted the greatest protagonists in the world of philosophy, science, literature, music and the arts. Exhibitions, conventions, debates offered knowledge of crucial modernism, throwing open unforeseen horizons for a young man, like him, eager to learn and to measure himself against the projects and the expectations of his generation. In his paintings he attempts to blend figurative elements and geometric solutions, associating immediate stimuli taken from reality with formal neo-constructivist analysis.
In the meantime, he took part in various exhibitions and was a candidate for the Premio San Floriano in Gorizia. In 1967 he held his first personal exhibition in Folgaria, a renowned mountain resort near Trento, and at the end of the same year he opened an art gallery in the town, called Nuovo Spazio [new space], perhaps to confirm his personal propensity for pictorial problems referred to the expressive values of a new concept of spatialism.
He became friends with the Venetian performers of post-dodecaphonic music and with the painters of the “Movimento dello Spazialismo” [the Spatialism Movement], sharing the manifests of this trend founded in Malsano by Lucio Fontana, with whom he would discuss his work on various occasions. He strengthened his relationship with the poet Alfonso Gatto, inviting him to hold conferences and readings at his Gallery and promoting with him the “Premio Folgaria”, a national competition for poetry and painting. As a gallery owner, he undertook various activities, group exhibitions and personal exhibitions by various artists of the new vanguards, but he also organised and hosted debates and readings of poetic texts.
In 1969 he was invited to a collective exhibition first in Venice and then in Rome and a few months later he presented a personal exhibition in Udine. The historian Pietro Zampetti, director of the Musei Civici Veneziani [Venetian Civic Museums], invited him to hold a personal exhibition at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa Gallery, but it would not be possible to organize this exhibition because the artist was called up for national service at the famous military engineering school La Cecchignola in Rome, where he used his free time to create a series of terracotta plaques (twelve panels) illustrating the work of the ‘fabriceris’.
The activity that he continued to promote through exhibitions at the Folgaria Gallery developed a cultural programme designed not only to revalue the members of historical Italian spearhead movement, but also to promote the most promising talents of the new generations. Of particular note, thanks to their importance nationally, were the exhibitions of the futurist Giovanni Korompay and the anticipatory environmental experiments of an emergent young artist, Germano Olivotto. With renewed enthusiasm he took an interest in the singular pictorial and graphic experiences of Giuseppe Zigaina for whom he would also organise a number of exhibitions in various Italian cities. In 1971, when he had concluded his national service, he returned to Venice, bringing to life the new premises of the Nuovo Spazio gallery which immediately distinguished itself for its innovative proposals, opening its halls to masters such as Guidi, Manzù, Spacal, Morlotti, Santomaso, Music, Bortoluzzi and to young artists destined for success, Finzi, Licata and the very young Plessi. At this time, his own artistic research was increasingly more decidedly directed towards abstract spatial poetry and completely abandoned a naturalistic line of transfiguration.
He met and frequented the photographic historian from Friuli, Italo Zannier, called to teach at the University of Architecture. After a few years, the Nuovo Spazio gallery assumed for Venice, a city which could boast prestigious historical precedents, an important, individual role, regularly visited by renowned writers and critics, from Pallucchini to Marchiori, from Apollonio to Mazzariol, and periodically even visited by Ezra Pound. The Gallery also hosted works by members of the “Programmed Art” and the "behaviourism", as well as new tendencies in women’s creative research.
In 1976 Friuli was devastated by a severe earthquake Chinese arrived the following day to offer assistance and with the aim of helping his people. Fortunately, his family was not directly harmed by the effects of the seismic activity. He remained some days visiting the worst hit areas – often difficult to reach – with his architect brother, registering the damage and reporting on the need for technicians to take charge of the reconstruction. At Mariano del Friuli he organised an exhibition of works by great Italian artists, devolving the income from sales in favour of the victims of the earthquake. He set up a special travelling exhibition of artists that would later sail on the tourist ship the Stradivari as it visited various Mediterranean ports. He organised the important personal exhibition by Armando Pizzinato. In 1979 he transferred the Nuovo Spazio gallery to a building in the centre of the city, just a short step from St. Mark's Square, thus being able to take advantage of much larger spaces which, in March, were splendidly inaugurated with the extraordinary personal exhibition dedicated to Giovanni Korompay.
He also continued the literary events, acting as host to writers and poets; he worked with Arnaldo Momo and Giovanni Poli for theatrical events. In May 1978 he married the daughter of the well-known writer and journalist Mario Ancona. In July, he returned to Venice to present an important exhibition by Luigi Veronesi, protagonist of the Italian abstract movement, which would encounter considerable success, also in the pages of the international press. In November, the exhibition of “aeropainting” and “stone syntheses” by the futurist Tullio Crali. For the first time in Europe he showed a collection of works by Inuit sculptors, with whom he had come into contact, receiving on this unusual occasion honours from a group of Quebec diplomats who arrived for the inauguration.
In 1979 the Nuovo Spazio gallery celebrated ten years of continuous activity, with a review that presented almost all the artists in whom Chinese had so far taken an interest. On this occasion a number of interviews appeared in the press, in which he traced the history of the gallery and described his personal concept of the cultural functions of a modern art dealer.
He published a folder containing works by Bortoluzzi, Korompay, Zigaina, to which he wrote the introduction which is also a manifest of the criteria he adopts in his work. This text by Chinese would later be shared by many artists and intellectuals who would countersign it, bearing explicit witness to their support of the moral and cultural aims of the gallery owner. Chinese was, in fact, an esteemed colleague with whom many of them had exhibited at various times. They had entrusted him with the task of representing them at the art fairs which had begun to appear in Italy. In the summer, while he was about to leave for the Fiera del Levante which had been held for some years, he received the news that his brother Renzo had been seriously injured in an accident at work. Concerned, he immediately joined his family in Friuli, who would be further distressed only a few months later by the sudden death of the father. He found a moment of serenity with the birth of his first daughter. He tells of these events in the autobiographical volume entitled, “Io, Chi?” [Who am I?], published in 1981 by Italia Letteraria with a wonderful preface written by his friend Zigaina. With great frankness the author describes his existence, the past events, the meetings and the exchanges with the artists, the vocation for living in symbiosis with characters who are in some way élite, who he admires profoundly for their spiritual consonance.
He worked with ever greater intensity on his artistic productions, but he never renounced organising exhibitions of national importance, positively commented by the specialised press, presenting a cycle of works from 1943 to 1976 by Zoran Music and an exhibition of modern Japanese artists. At the same time, he cultivated a passion of the environment of his beloved lagoon, which he often sailed in a small boat. Here he would find inspiration for a luminous chromatism of iridescent reflections that he would evocatively transfer to the cadenced geometries of an absolute spatiality of images. He travelled continuously, visiting exhibitions and artists’ studios, establishing friendships and working relationships, and making contact with the principal Italian collectors in order to plan further exhibitions. Unfortunately, in 1985 his mother, to whom he was particularly close, died leaving an immense void, because he had always tried to live up to her example and would have liked to emulate her extraordinary personal qualities, her sensitivity and lively intelligence.
In 1986 during an exhibition at Palazzo Grassi, “Futurism-Futurists”, he organised an extraordinary anthology of Tullio Crali, with no less than sixty-two paintings from various periods, an event of considerable importance in the Italian and international fields. He followed with equal interest the development of certain young European artists, almost unknown in their own countries, but who would soon make a reputation for themselves, with truly surprising results, through the exhibitions that he organised. With great generosity, Chinese felt he was more destined to support young artists, many of great value, than to promote his own artistic work. A work, moreover, that had developed in an increasingly independent language which was characterised by the need to experiment centred on trying out other materials, overcoming the two-dimensions of the canvas to create plastic effects with greater constructive efficacy.
Between 1987 and 1988 he even decided to abandon teaching, which he had undertaken for some years with great enthusiasm, in order to better dedicate himself to his artistic research and to the running of the gallery, which had now moved to the mainland, in Mestre, with the intent of facilitating the car journeys from one city to another in search of artists and collectors with whom he planned new exhibitions. The new premises were significantly inaugurated with a review of famous masters, and this exhibition was followed by an extraordinary show of little known works by Tancredi, who died in 1984 and with whom he had entertained a close relationship based on unconditional esteem. Yet, since he also wished to pursue in a more constant manner the researches that he had undertaken, he chose to definitively move to his city of origin, Mariano, he had a modernistic villa built amongst the vineyards, in the midst of the fertile Friuli countryside, thus having a vast studio in which to work and encouraging his growing children to enjoy daily contact with the beauties of nature. Chinese finally felt free to dedicate himself completely to painting, which would lead him to experiment even with industrial materials, to use ‘precious powders’, ‘golds floating on overseas transparencies’, as Zigaina notes in his introduction, written for the artist in 1991. During this period he painted various subjects at times linked with particular experiences, yet defining a line of research towards a fantastic re-creation of reality in which to borrow aspects and moments of intense emotionality. From the Venetian ambience come memories and perceptions found in the paintings from that period, relating to the ‘byzantine theories’ and the ‘cathedrals of the lagoon’.
When the Gulf War broke out in 1991, he was so moved by this terrible tragedy that he painted a series of paintings with images of opposing signs, dramatically exacerbating the contrast between the delicate hues of serene landscapes and dark disturbing shapes. He felt the need to return to confronting his public and therefore began once again to exhibit his work in galleries in Friuli. He also accepted the proposal of his gallery-owner friend, Paolo Barozzi, secretary and faithful biographer of Peggy Guggenheim, who often opened his home in Milano to present the exhibition of an artist who, in his opinion, was worthy of note, presenting him to the many cultured and demanding guests. Chinese prepared the exhibition with care and sent a selection of works from his most recent production, however he did not neglect his own gallery in Mestre, where he exhibited – amongst others – the pop art by Mimmo Rotella, his famous ‘decollages’.
At his home in Mariano he organised a sort of crowded futurist evening, inviting Crali to declaim texts by the poets of the movement and where his daughter, Duna, a classical ballet dancer, performed a creative ballet to the music of Duke Ellington. It was to be the start of a series of events that he would ever more frequently organise, in the summer, in the vast garden of the villa, followed by friends and enthusiasts from various Italian regions. Important collectors showed an interest in his paintings and, in 1994, the township of San Giovanni al Natisone dedicated him a first anthological exhibition, held in the sumptuous Villa de Brandis and accompanied by a programme of concerts by renowned ensembles and soloists.
Between 1994 and 1995 he composed a cycle of paintings on the theme of ‘anthromorphous trees’, a theme through which he intended to symbolise the disharmony between nature and man, but also the existential solitude of one who suffers the disquiet of modern society, closed in its egoisms and condemned to forms of struggle increasingly unbearable for the weak, who are overcome by the opposing forces. Yet he also expresses the impulse to move upwards, to ascend towards the pinnacles of spiritual plentitude.
He exhibited in Venice at the Palazzo delle Prigioni Vecchie [the historical prisons], in St. Mark's Cathedral, these are new pictorial cycles, where the compositive thread already seems structured in the neat geometric plugs of chromatic variations, in the tension of reconstructing a new architecture from space.
During his assiduous, although solitary, pilgrimages into the Friuli countryside, he discovered, in a hamlet near Taipana, the ruins of an old mill, fascinated by the still uncontaminated natural setting, the evocative beauty of the area on the banks of the river Cornappo, brimming with trout and freshwater prawns, close to a tumbling waterfall, he fell in love with the place and decided to buy and restore it, making it his new home.
When the lengthy restoration work was finished, the mill appeared to be the ideal place to welcome cultural events, so he organised a series of meetings with artists, writers and musicians, inviting them to take part in regular events, associating concerts and open-air sculpture exhibitions, presentations of books and debates on current affairs.
In 1986 he held a personal exhibition at the magnificent Villa Pisani di Stra, a jewel of classic Venetian architecture and the following year he was invited by the municipal authorities of Pordenone to exhibit in the no less renowned Villa Galvani. In June, at his gallery in Mestre, he presented the historical Spatialism Movement. He cooperated in the activities of a new artistic current called “Hyperspatialism”, a trend with which he felt a bond both on the theoretical plane and in the effective stylistic correspondence.
In 1998 he prepared an exhibition of his paintings for the Centro Friuliano Arti Plastiche [Friulian centre of plastic arts], composed of about seventy works on the theme of ‘trees’ and ‘cathedrals’ exemplifying his research from recent years. He also held a personal exhibition at the San Giusto Castle in Trieste, a cycle of works based on expressive freedom that combined figurative and abstract elements, in the key of a visionary symbolism.
The following year he exhibited at the Isontina state library in Gorizia and was invited to the exhibition sponsored by the Italian state railways for the millennium celebrations, held at Villa Ca' Zenobio, near Treviso.
He also opened the Nuovo Spazio gallery in Udine, in premises in the city centre, inaugurating it with an exhibition of internationally famous artists, many of whom had worked with him for years. In cooperation with the Mascherini archive, he organised an important review of the works of the long-deceased sculptor. He invited the painter Ferruccio Bortoluzzi to exhibit, who would present his well-known ‘reliefs’ constructed from recycled materials.
Both galleries continued to hold regular events, with distinctly independent programmes, so that he was forced to travel continually and widely, seeking artists, arranging dates, transportation, catalogues, a time-consuming occupation that took him away from his studio. In spite of this, he managed to reconcile the two vocations, creating art and making known the art of those he admired because he felt an ideal affinity. His pictorial research was in the meantime moving towards a composed experimentation of formal methods and instrumental techniques, with the aim of strengthening the spatial configurations of his luminous chromatism. He made use of glassy materials that he bought from the Murano glassmakers, inserting them into the variegated grounds of the pictures, attaining further effects of iridescent transparencies, unexpected reflections, often enclosing the painting in a plexiglass case, also to protect the parts in relief.
These works would meet with considerable success at the exhibition he held in April 2003 at the Artis gallery in Paris and a few months later at the Sauveur Bismuth gallery, also in the French capital.
The anthology organised by the municipal authorities of Mariano would encounter similar praise from critics and the public; it was divided into two sections, one for the historical part presented in the Town Hall council chamber and the other, relating to the works with Murano glass, in the civic library. Nowadays, his works are requested by public institutes and foreign collections, presented in international art fairs, shown on websites and in the specialised press, both Italian and international.
He continues with
his ‘spatialist’ research, at the same time investigating an original procedure
combining elegant, exquisitely pictorial elements and objects in various
materials, between bidimensonality and tridimensionality, with expressive
solutions of vivid plasticity, evoking imaginary cosmological scenarios. In
Lugano he had a personal exhibition at Rinaldo
Invernizzi's.
In 2005 he attained great success in Spain with exhibitions of his latest pictorial experiences, in the halls of the companies Dates SL and Faconauto in Madrid and with a presentation during an official ceremony at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum. These initiatives were sponsored by Mitsubishi Motors España.
He took part in a literary competition organised by the Telecom Future Center in Venice, reaching one of the first places. But painting has once again become his main activity, the daily challenge in which he measures his human and creative aspirations.
In 2007 a monography by Toni
Toniato is published : the last period works are presented, the ones nearest to
the Spatialism with a short excursus on the previous works.
At once this book is requested by
the most important bookshops and also in Ca’ Pesaro bookshop, in Venice and in
Milan, at Brera Academy. It is presented abroad, in Germany and in Austria, in
occasion of personal exhibitions of Chinese, then in Switzerland and only later
in Italy, in different places and by wellknown curators and last at the
International Gallery of Modern Art of Ca’ Pesaro, in Venice, presented by
Toniato himself and by the director of Ca’ Pesaro Museum, doctor Fuso. In this period Chinese is beginning a new adventure, the one of the
creation of some installations. The book has an elegant pasteboard binding,
with some glasses, by an idea of the artist himself: this binding is the source
of the Chinese’s idea of transforming in an event and in a work the
presentation of this Monography; for these events he creates some installations
with the books and metal balls; near them he puts some of his important
paintings.