Critical Anthology
Hyacinth Spagnoletti
Presentation of the volume “The little girl and the revolution” – Ed. Rebellato 1971
I had sworn to myself that I would no longer write prefaces to poetry books. Reasons for tiredness? Perhaps. For almost twenty years, since the beginning of my youth, as many friends remember, I have been insistent on suggestions, readings and interpretations of contemporary poets, anthological works... and the moment comes when one realizes that each season of one's life corresponds to a center of interests destined to change in the following season. In addition to these reasons of a personal nature, there are others of a general nature. I believe there is no need for a special radar to realize that every attempt at interference, presentation or endorsement of those who publish verses becomes increasingly futile today in the face of the offensive of direct advertising, and this in turn is suffocated by the attack of audio-visual means capable of destroying the traditional relationship established by the poet with the reader from person to person.
So if I now try to talk about Tonino Gottarelli's book - whose title seems to summarize the underlying theme of one of Bernanos's masterpieces, Les grands cimétières sous la lune - it is because since 1961, that is, since I presented the collection "Yesterday and Today" to the same publisher, it seemed to me that I had made a bet on the poet's future. "His undisciplined genre - I wrote then - that completely gratuitous impressionism on which he has stopped for so many years, is perhaps finished. In terms of perception the poet will be equally happy, in terms of communication more resentful, humorous, colorful." And I added: "We are certain that he will tell us stories through images, he will come forward not only with his sensuality, but with his psychological penetration."
I had not guessed the content of these “stories”, nor could I then lean towards the anarchist-rebellious side, where Gottarelli’s new word has taken up camp. An intermediate collection, La botte di Diogene ( The barrel of Diogene), already establishes a safe topos, “the barrel”, like a spell from which to make the discovery of the world and its verification flow (“ the reason for life may escape me – but not the language of crickets ”). In the areas of perception, Gottarelli takes steps forward to overcome his radical impressionism, the pleasure of enjoying the sacredness of nature from the birth to the death of every single inhabitant of the world, of grasping the gestation of dawns and sunsets, of descending into the heart of the elements. And how? Sniffing, biting, jumping into the barrel, metaphorically coming out of his syntonic perspectives, reinterpreting the visual space in his own way, risking in these poetic collages , very similar to those implemented in his pictorial technique, the hypothesis of a sarcastic friction between the instinct to see and that of understanding: a kind of exciting and excited multidimensional game where the formal fact is no longer an end in itself and implies "prohibitions" as well as truths to be ascertained, within the sphere of consciousness. (…)
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George Ruggeri
“ Dreams, memories and dead leaves in the paintings of Tonino Gottarelli” - Exhibition catalogue of the “Casa dell'Arte” Gallery (Sasso Marconi) - 1984
Tonino is an eel in love. You watch him glide dreamily and solitary in the light that mirrors and refracts, but don't think you can grab him and put a label on him. Which one? Painter, Poet, Philosopher, Dreamer, Polished Dialectician? If you look for the painter, you find the poet underfoot; if you chase the philosopher, you discover the subtle doctor; if you listen to the dreamer, you sense the presence of a perennial lover, you don't know if of nature or of the celestial creatures that inhabit the planet. Now, however, it is necessary to frame the painter, only the painter, and see it between us.
I have been following him for many years and I have always been enchanted by his constant willingness to look at things with the eye of a poet. The gray or blue line on the horizon - his example - seems to him like a prohibition beyond which only he is allowed to look, and how can one not notice that line? - it runs on the canvas with infinite tenderness. He himself says that he is perfecting his destiny by saving real leaves and flowers, forgotten at the bottom of ditches or drawers, to glue them into collages or paint them on the canvas.
The landscapes, the seascapes, the gentle hills of his Romagna, the flowers, the dead leaves, each of his graphic or pictorial interventions bears the unmistakable sign of a clear personality. Alien to any old or new trend, the solitary painter from Imola seems to want to follow only his dreams, his abandonments, both overflowing from the depths of an existential melancholy. Sometimes, it is true, he indulges in literary concessions; more often, however, he reveals himself with authority, a painter with an elegant sign, of good figurative education, even impatient in the synthesis of the expressive gesture; master of a practiced technique. (…)
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Efrem Tavoni
Tonino Gottarelli Exhibition – The House of Art Gallery – Sasso Marconi (Bologna) - 1985
(…) Tonino Gottarelli is a name dear to the people of Romagna, his land; even if it is a bit tight for him because as an artist and poet he considers himself a citizen of the world.
His paintings are born from a constant state of grace that seems to be innate in his gentle soul. Don't get distracted while looking at them: you will easily discover the subtle lyricism of this poet of the pen and brush, being immediately fascinated by it. Don't be surprised if the artist's name is not resonant. Our country, fortunately, always reserves surprises. There are still painters who work in silence, far from the clamor of fashion and advertising, seriously committed to the search for their and our poetic truth.
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Alessandro Mozzambani
Presentation of the Notebooks “Italian Artists of Today” Nr. 500 – Ed. Ghelfi - 1988
In the case of the painter from Imola Tonino Gottarelli, the wedge of support (and perforation) of the contemporary poet that resides in the painter remains evident as long as the painter lives together with the poet. In fact, Giorgio Ruggeri warns us – in a beautiful text entitled If the poet discovers the color of the rose – that in the case of Gottarelli “the poet and the painter place themselves at such points of equidistance that it is impossible to understand who prevails; it is impossible to establish whether it is a poet who paints or a painter who writes verses”.
But Gottarelli overcomes the problem in his own way, almost carelessly, in his dialectical “impasse”, and he does so by offering us paintings painted, or equally “written” with the effective ease of a sign that traces the boundaries of the painting, at the same time expanding its capacity to incorporate the painted space into the physical correspondence of that calligraphic and also somatic drawing. Graphological expertise is not needed then, but a series of adhesions, sympathies, sparks of curiosity: when the sign supports the space of the image, or when, instead, the painting just hinted at or physically defined, celebrates the snap of the wrist that so amazes its improvisation (which, however, in the close-up becomes a fundamental element and dominates, well beyond the intentions, the visual message, its sweet didactic violence, its fragrance: which invite the slightest warning, the hinted joke but from the evidence of the solemn metaphor). At that point the temptation towards the poet, or on the other hand towards the painter, has no more reason to exist since painting is able to give to both in its immense property the part of primacy and of consequent successive amalgamation, and determining as much as the maximum, now, of the results and of the outcomes both critical and emotional or expressive. (…)
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Frank Basile
“ Vista Grande” - presentation of the exhibition catalogue at the Galleria Forni - Bologna – 1994
In Gottarelli's work, between word and painted image, there remains a common root, almost a lyrical 1 etrisme that wraps itself around color to give measure to the grains that have come out of the mill of time. Writing and painting, telling things as in a fable picked up on the street and pushing the eye into a sea without horizons, far away, well beyond the physical data to live a poetry that is an intoxication between pieces of letters and splinters of palette, to compose a painting that is the extract of a dream where the lines and chromatic values are elements that speak with the accents of discovery, freed as they are from any illustrative function. And if the artist feels blocked by antinomies that seem insurmountable, if the reverberation of a remote chord is not enough to make explicit a sentimental annotation, here is the magic of the elegiac data, be it a sign result or a chromatic meaning. So all that remains is the simplicity of any word to apply to the canvas, all that remains is to touch the strings of expressiveness to place in an aprospective space those grains that in the composition become appearances of new realities. How to allude to a poetic fatality in the identification of an additional component to be translated into a bright coloristic grouping, how to carry out an action in some respects attributable to the chromatic vehemence of Secam or the restlessness of a De Kooning, where the hatching reveals the will not to indulge in details and specificity.
Unresolved landscapes, which do not propose a definition of reality, atelier visions, flowers and still lifes similar to figures of palpable enigmas and which become private attractions of an equally private world. Everything is a reason for analysis and wonder for Gottarelli who from a breath of wind, as from a shadow, knows how to draw motifs to transcribe with the tones of enchantment. Life unrolls an infinite carpet of dawns and sunsets, time runs like a train without brakes. (…)
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Victor Sgarbi
“ Give a hand to the sun” - Presentation of the catalogue “ Poetry becomes image ” Pinacoteca Comunale Imola - 2000
“Give a hand to the sun”. This is the role in which Tonino Gottarelli, a poet with words and brushes, recognizes his identity as a painter, identifying in it the most authentic meaning of his art. A role that, for those who do not know Gottarelli, might seem to have titanic ambitions, like a modern-day Prometheus. Instead, it is a daily oratio of Franciscan humility, a philosophy not of the heavens, but of the earth and for the earth that is closely related to the most human of nature's feelings.
Lending a hand to the sun means, in Gottarelli's sweet and evocative language, "taking things out of the darkness", looking beyond what physical sight allows us, searching in depth for their substance under the most external aspect. Lending a hand to the sun means looking with the eyes of the soul. Gottarelli has been looking and painting with the eyes of the soul for fifty years now, making this experience a reason of vital necessity not only for his art, but also for his existence. Gottarelli does not need to look at Caspar Friedrich to concentrate his reflection on nature, at the same time existential and aesthetic. He does not need the emotional shock that the cognition of the sublime generates to question himself on the greatest systems.
Gottarelli's nature, so apparently simple, so common in its homologation to the semiology of modern civilization (the road signs, the lampposts that stand out in many of the artist's paintings), so far from any reason for disquiet, would seem to define almost a dimension of the anti-sublime compared to that of the romantic landscape painters. But it would be a contrast, this one between sublime and anti-sublime , that would risk creating fractures between Gottarelli and his previous theorists. (…)
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Alberto Bretoni
“Gottarelli writer”- presentation of the catalogue “Poetry becomes image” Pinacoteca Comunale Imola – 2000
... Who is Gottarelli the writer? (...) He is a cultured artist and also trained on an academic level. His is a writing that uses language in a way that still has tensions, sometimes exaggerations, the laying bare of a heart, but that already tends towards more ordered forms, aims to give and build perspectives, and to put in relation a sensitive individuality, that feels, perceives and lets itself, like a photographic plate, be impressed by the phenomenon of the world. Gottarelli's writing is placed within this new prose, tense, nervous and rapid. Certainly in Gottarelli, there is this ability, this dynamic, on the one hand of impressionistic movement to record what appears in the instant, in the moment that is outside of us, in reality; and on the other there is an opposite tension, of expressionistic taste, that of making the particular speak. It is the ability to keep in balance and to make expressive this tension between opposites, which is apparently a contradiction in true artists, it is a newly dynamic quality. And Gottarelli's writing goes precisely in this direction. (...) This means that Gottarelli is a writer who did not have certainties on the page about what to say and how to say it, but is a writer who opens himself to instinctive possibility, as long as this instinct frames a vision of reality, frames a conscious position on reality and of reality. (...)
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Marilena Pasquali
“ Breaths of Poetry ” - presentation of the catalogue “ Breaths of Poetry ” Cesena Municipal Art Gallery - 2005
Every time I find myself in front of a work by Tonino Gottarelli I feel an immediate impression of serene calm that is valid as a conscious acceptance of life, however beautiful even if it is as fraught and difficult as an obstacle course. Indeed, the paintings of the artist from Romagna help us understand how it is possible to fully enjoy life without having to necessarily participate in this almost always ruthless race, to carve out instead a niche of reflection and wisdom that does not exclude a priori dialogue with others but that requires authentic relationships, deep connections, real encounters.
The meeting ground with Tonino is that of poetry, translated by him now into images and now into words, always for short breaths on the edge of silence.
His roads that get lost in the elsewhere, behind the horizon of a curve; his flowers concentrated in the lightness of a petal; his papers soaked in color that seem to lift one from the other to gradually let glimpse some crumbs of a different, deeper reality; certain notes traced with a light hand on the body of the canvas itself, a sign that underlines the magic of color and seems to want to hold it while everything fades into the light: everything in Tonino's work tells of his now long "coexistence with life" that finds in the most secret folds of everyday life - the simple, almost sparse objects of the studio, the landscapes recreated in memory, a bunch of flowers that slowly fades touched by a last ray of sun - its expressive justification, its poetic reason. (…)
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Claudio Spadoni
“Gottarelli: The vision-emotion” - presentation of the catalogue “ The colour of the soul ” Museo San Domenico Imola - 2017
“It is easier for me to paint than to write, and I usually prefer to express an emotion through painting. I paint with extreme immediacy, and I could compare myself to those writers capable of writing fifty pages in two or three hours, without ever stopping.” Some fundamental characteristics of his painting are already stated in these words by Gottarelli in response to a question by Paolo Levi. (…) In short, an emotion to be transcribed through images, colors, shapes, with the immediacy, spontaneity, rapidity of the pictorial gesture, of the brushstroke that flows, lingers for a moment, grazes the surface as if pushed by a gust of wind, or thickens, fixing itself on the canvas or on the sheet. (…)
To grasp the only possible reality, that of the surface, precisely: "a sort of veil devoid of depth", as Gottarelli himself wrote, according to what he called "the point of view". And let's say right away, the point of view of a philosopher and a child at the same time. Because in Gottarelli the two figures almost paradoxically become one. Herein lies the originality of the artist and the man, certainly outside of conventions, of the rules of the game especially of our time. He could talk about Nietsche, Groddeck, Reich, and at the same time affirm with great candor that he was a painter who only wanted to be a painter, with the aim of simply making beautiful paintings, not dictating aesthetic paradigms. An apparently almost disarming statement, which he loved to remember; but taken from Kandinsky and certainly with the awareness that in the mouth of a painter-theoretician like the Russian it had all the air of an oxymoron. One of the many oxymorons on which a good part of its history contemporary art has founded. Gottarelli said he did not go beyond the surface of things, which basically means the landscape or still life, since his painting is for long stretches almost emptied of the human figure, except for a few rare appearances. (…)
Other times painting and collage divide portions of space with a surprising result of osmosis, or ending up instead underlining a relationship between different material qualities. To be explored, discovered, like all of Gottarelli's painting, as moments of a vision-emotion sought and lived every day with uncorrupted sincerity and philosophical candor.
