Tonino Gottarelli - writer and painter

Tonino Gottarelli: Painter, Poet, Philosopher, Dreamer, Refined Debater? If you look for the painter, you find the poet; if you pursue the philosopher, you discover the subtle doctor; if you listen to the dreamer, you feel the presence of a perpetual lover, you do not know if there is the nature or the celestial creatures that inhabit the planet. Now, however, it is the game to frame the painter, the painter alone, and to see him among us.

I've been “chasing” him for many years and he has always enchanted me with his constant disposition to know things with the poet's eye. The gray line or the blue line on the horizon, his example seems to be a prohibition beyond which only he is allowed to look, and that line how couldn’t be noticed? - It runs on the canvas with infinite tenderness. He himself says he is going to perfect his destiny by saving true leaves and flowers, forgotten in the bottom of the ditches or drawers, in order to put them into collages or paint them on the canvas.

The landscapes, the shore, the sweet hills of his Romagna, the flowers, the dead leaves, his every graphic or pictorial intervention brings the unmistakable sign of a clear personality. Stranger to any old or new trend, the solitary Imola painter seems to want to follow only his dreams, his abandonments, everything overflowing from the bottom of an existential melancholy. Sometimes, it is true, he indulges in literary concessions; more often he reveals himself, with authority, an elegant painter, of a good figurative education, also impatient in the synthesis of expressive gesture; master of a trained technique. (...) 

(Giorgio Ruggeri "Dreams, remembrances and dead leaves in paintings by Tonino Gottarelli" - Catalog exhibition of the "Casa dell'Arte" Gallery, Sasso Marconi, Italy)