Artist Bio
Giuliana Macchi was born in
Bologna where she lives and works.
She has successfully participated in exhibitions, events and competitions. She attends Maestro Alcide Fontanesi’s atelier at the Centro Mascarella.
… hers is a gestural art which ranges from graphics, in which she expresses her sign straight off, to manipulation of material, again gesturally giving it life and colour in a plastic and chromatic triumph.
Mario Domenico Storari
It was several years ago, in 1987, that I ran into “Paesaggio Urbano” (Urban Landscape), one of Macchi’s exhibitions, held in the rooms of the gallery “L’Ariete” at 7 Via Marsini, Bologna.
A delicacy of shades, of sign and also of moods characterize these works which sometimes however become disturbing and incisive.
The painter proceeds to the conquest of the right expression of her poetic world, which derives only from herself but which, to express itself, finds – in an almost supreme quality of instinct – that rightness of shades, values and measure. In brief, these belong, rather than to modern conceptions, to her natural bent towards modernity. An artist of highly acute chromatic sensitivity who shades the refined color in tonalities of an actually extenuated gentleness.
Without phases or pauses Macchi, in accordance with the limpid continuity of an impulsive coherence, appeals to her own instinctive charge and poet’s heart.
Franco Solmi
The relationship you manage to establish almost immediately with Giuliana Macchi’s work undeniably finds its genesis in the balanced synthesis which this artist has been able to carry out between two essential and sometimes contradictory moments of her aesthetic sensitivity.
On the one hand an irrepressible “creative fury”, constantly manifest and expressed in a total freedom of sign, and experienced with the taste of the most independent gesture. On the other, a compositional balance, measured and precise, guided with a lucid final awareness. This awareness is all the more surprising inasmuch as it is not attributable - by the artist’s own admission - to a long (meaning broad and chronological) formal research but rather to an innate ability for visual construction, essential balances, experienced in an unconscious and visceral manner.
With a superficial approach the type of abstraction predominant in Macchi’s works might appear traceable to evocations of clearly naturalistic origins, in the sense of a revisiting, in a strictly personal key, of the aesthetic approach which was typical of this land - the Po Valley region - some decades ago. But in reality the correct dimension to attribute, in my opinion, is quite another. What I mean is “informal” work, pursued with the greatest freedom, which does not favor any one of its own constitutive elements or which - to put it better - favors each of them in equal measure, in a “masterful” melting: a color range which is typically sculptural.
In Giuliana Macchi’s artistic production special mention must be made of her works on paper which, originating incredibly as simple memos of ideas, like preparatory studies for works “under way” to be defined and re-elaborated, ended up by taking on their own configuration, absolutely autonomous, in which the chromatic gestural aspect has the advantage over every other graphic necessity, converting their position of departure to a point of arrival.
Angelo Varzi
Licinio Boarini
“… In such sketches without the restraint of censure aimed at descriptive lines, there nonetheless remerge hypotheses of presence such as to adumbrate facts of nature which habit makes us experience in every objective exhibition, so any randomness expressed leads Giuliana Macchi’s intention towards emblematic directions, in no way imposed but elegantly proposed in a coloristic shading suffused by light and tangible poetry…”
Giuliana Macchi by Valerio De Hò
Giuliana Macchi plays on the composition of a broad sign that connects rather than divides the planes of the surface. “Fragmenta” therefore reveals precise personalities and a “strong” painting involved in the poetics of the real, as in the exercising of style.
Giuliana Macchi
Giuliana Macchi sets out from an academic training and arrived at her own conception of painting, which is that of the informal, where we note a very strong vital thrust, in some cases irrepressible. As she gradually proceeds with the work the artist feels the need of increasingly greater spaces. At the same time, while the colors darken, certain signs maintain their light colors, like a symbol of opening towards the others and of learning new things. But over and above, being spiritual, her painting also focuses on matter, as if indicating an earthly way to the road of the soul. Combining these two things the artist arrives at molding painting, like a farmer who ploughs his field and every furrow becomes rich and fertile, ready to generate new life, useful in itself but above all to others. As her knowledge evolves step by step she also feels the need to experiment with new things, new techniques, but always on wide spaces. Her latest works are more geometrical, they seem to consist of so many tesserae, like a mosaic, or to put it better a puzzle which assembles and disassembles in our mind, always creating different images and meanings that always give rise to pleasant thoughts. Perhaps this last is due to the use of color, with dark -though warm – shades mixed with sand, which renders the surfaces different and changeable to the eye, while creating in the mind memories of distant, ancient beaches. In her most recent works Giuliana Macchi succeeds in setting us free to fantasize and create new worlds which previously our imagination had not managed to understand or imagine.
Cinzia Insolia
