NERI

which stillness and motion coexist, allows us to acquire a new
mental and often also physical receptivity.
In this sense, a painting is, among the means of expression,
the most used, the most authentic, the most natural and
at the same time, the most abstract, even when on appearance
it seems figurative, pure meaning, in which the center
of creativity of the form is accentuated, following its genesis
step by step. Paul Klee says «to start with there is action...
above is the idea». The work of art therefore represents for an
artist an experimental and spontaneous moment of creative
ideation, where he evidently testifies the formation of the image,
the signs as a form of writing that by emerging from the
unconscious becomes visual thought. And in his works Giovanni
Neri expresses the meaning of a visual and spontaneous
essentiality, but which is structurally linked to a natural and
colorful vision of life: fiercely self-taught, with the impulse to
speak a visual language. Proudly assimilated to nature that
has always been present, even in an authoritarian manner, in
his life, with the impertinence of shapes and colors. But perhaps
the most important element of being an artist that has
learned everything from nature is the incorporation of silence
into his creative story. That silentium isn’t just keeping quiet
and neither the absence of sounds, noises, and voices. The
artist’s silence is more like that pause, that interval lost in the
convulsive dynamics of our society that Gillo Dorfles reminds
us of lucidly: «A pause, a rarefaction filled and enriched by his
non-commensurable imagination». Since starting his artistic
career, Giovanni Neri has always worked following “themes”
that he then develops in series of works, the origins of which
can be found in his personal life, his emotions, and his sensitivity
when observing the world. He started off as a young
man, like many artists, with figurative paintings, with series of
landscapes, some rarefied, others were more accurately precise,
as well as portraits and self-portraits in which the bold
color seems to want to embody the essence of life and still
life paintings clearly inspired by Morandi, strong locus of the
artist’s “silence”. Where, as Giulio Carlo Argan theorized, «the
opposite of representation or form, understood as catharsis, is
not the fragment, but the continuum: indeed form is a limit, the
continuum is an absence, an uncertainty of the limit».
By using color, always central in his concept of painting
which is halfway between an abstract language and a concrete
content, a symbol of the artist’s uninterrupted dialogue with
nature from an emotional and sensorial point of view, Giovanni
Neri has in recent years totally abandoned figurative painting,
his research evolving towards a synthesis between sign, gesture
and color, between thought and emotionality. From the dissemination
of the matter-color and signs, or from their thick assemblage
in space in a sort of horror vacui , he heads towards
rarefaction and a free flow of sign in color, without ever losing
his great pictorial richness. The sign is the element of cohesion
between thought and gesture, space and color, and through
the interaction of all these components the artist defends the
central and essential role of the language of painting. He expresses
with his uncontainable sign a gestural line that sets on
the wrong track, guided by a manual impetuosity, identity of an
emotive and cultural expressionism inserted in a solid reality. The
structure of each work is thus composed like the expression of a
non verbal thought, transformed in an articulated and consolidated
structure in the revelation of reality, where it collects a stylistic
effort that’s capable of transforming a desire into a creative irony,
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