Massimo Giannoni
b. 1954, Italy
Italian artist Massimo Giannoni attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, where in 1979 he was awarded for the Lubiam Prize (Mantova), given to the best student from all the Fine Arts academies of Italy. He boasts a long series of international exhibitions and fairs. In December 2021, Giannoni joined in the permanent collection “Quirinale Contemporaneo”, curated by Enrica Renata Mazzantini, at Palazzo del Quirinale, Rome.
Giannoni's work focuses upon the representation of places of dense storage and accumulation; places of memory. Libraries, stock exchanges, squares and natural science museums are recurring subjects. Within these spaces, the artist records an orderly and sometimes disorderly overabundance of information.
Giannoni focusses upon the environment, left without the presence of man. It points to the inexorable passage of time, where objects remain dormant as an indication of the people who came before.
He uses a technique that evades the counterposed methods of abstraction and figurative representation. His brushwork is characterized by the layering of impasto oil paint, building upon the canvas to enhance the expressive power of the image until it seems to vibrate with the same abundance as its subject. Distance is fundamental to the appreciation of his process. The thick matter, spread out with a spatula, makes the contours crumble, the composition dissolves and only when viewed from a distance does it recompose itself. In this way, the paint both describes the composition, and assumes the same physical quality of the subject at hand.
Massimo Giannoni's work has been heralded as "rooms of wonders". They are metaphorical representations of place, briefly deserted, that tempt us to spend time pondering every aspect of their character. We long to sit, to read, to understand these overwhelmingly busy spaces by running our hands across the bustling bookshelves, and to realise that there is order to the chaos.