With Lirica elementare, Studio Guastalla presents the latest cycle of work by Alfredo Rapetti Mogol: canvas and paper coated with a thick layer of cement, bitumen and acrylic, which acts as a three-dimensional material support for the scoring of marks, traces and graffiti. For the first time Rapetti Mogol has added to his usual palette of pure white, cement grey and bitumen brown, two new colours: ultramarine blue and lacquer red, which lends extraordinary visual impact to the work and triggers a myriad symbolic associations from the whole history of art.

Rapetti Mogol, world-famous lyricist (winner of numerous Grammy Awards for his song lyrics) and one who has collaborated, also at intellectual level, with some of the greatest musicians, sees in his paintings a felicitous synthesis of word, image and music, his three greatest passions. The paintings become a visualisation of a mental and psychological process. Thanks to a special technique known as impuntura (stitching), the action of painting merges with the act of writing, and the signs “dug” into the material are like a primordial palimpsest, acquiring the fluidity of a letter, of a musical score of a poem in verse. They gush forth, as if automatically, from his hand – a painted alphabet that appears like prints or tracks left behind, traces which flower spontaneously onto the canvas.

Prayer and mantra, poetry and prose, blots which spread freely over the paper, creating impossible topographies: in these works Rapetti Mogol shatters writing and image, taking on the whole great twentieth century tradition, from the Avant-gardes to Spatialism, but simultaneously invoking the subtlety of oriental calligraphy.

Alfredo Rapetti Mogol was born in Milan in 1961 and his artistic education owed much to the family background, in which an air of music, literature and poetry had been breathed for generations. While still very young, Rapetti Mogol was introduced by his maternal grandfather, Alfredo De Pedrini, President of the Graphic Arts Association, into the artistic milieu of Milan. He conceived a passion for painting, with which he combined training at the Milan Cartoon School as well as publishing activities. He experimented with various styles of painting, resulting in an invitation in 1966 to join the studio of the artists Alessandro Algardi and Mario Arlati, and to share in their pictorial research. In the atelier in Via Nota, Rapetti worked intensely for four years, gradually coming to the conviction that he would have to unite his two greatest passions, writing and painting, positing them as visualisations of the mental and psychological process. With the aid of a special technique known as impuntura (stitching), the action of painting is fused with the act of writing, and the words begin to be marked not just on paper, but also on canvas.

The marks, signs, traces and graffiti of a creative and conscious humanity – Rapetti Mogol's works follow the ideal path of pictorial script: - the more universal it is, the more breaks into splinters and challenges centuries of art history, from the historic Avant-garde to Conceptualism, by way of the Spatialist experiments of Lucio Fontana and the abstract writings of the 1950s.

Once he had found a form of expression congenial to his poetic vision, there was no stopping him. A veritable explosion of exhibitions, both solo and collective, have been held since the late 1990s and the artist, as indefatigable as his work, constantly flits between Italy and the rest of the world – universal, indeed. His most notable exhibitions were held at the Museo della Permanente, Milan, 2002, the Salon d'Automne Paris, Espace Charenton in November 2004, the Mars Contemporary Art Gallery, Moscow, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, the Riga Foreign Art Museumand the Grand Palais, Paris, with the show “Comparaisons”. Among solo shows worth mentioning were those at the Galleria Cà d’Oro in Roma, 2003, the KPMG Foundation of Berlin, in the same year, the Galleria Maretti Arte Monaco in Montecarlo and Villa Olmo, Como, in 2004, L’Albergo delle Povere di Palermo, in 2005, and in the following year at the Certosa di San Lorenzo, Padula, Salerno. In 2009, 80 of his works were exhibited at the Palazzo della Ragione, Mantua. In 2010, under the aegis of the De Chirico Foundation, he exhibited in three prestigious US museums and universities, including New York University and the Santa Monica Sculpture Gallery, and he held a one-man-show at the Mudima Foundation in Milan.

Lecturer at the Centro Europeo di Toscolano and in the Università dell'Immagine, Milan and the University of New York, Rapetti has been invited to take part in countless conferences and workshops. We remember particularly his lecture delivered at the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation, Milan, and his teaching on the Masters course at the Università Cattolica, Milan.

Since 2004 he has been a member of the international group “Signes et Traces”, founded by Riccardo Licata, and has received several prizes, including the "Etoile" for painting, Provincia of Rome.

His powerful work has aroused enormous interest and sparked off considerable debate, among critics ranging from Duccio Trombadorito Gianluca Ranzi, from Luciano Caprileto Maurizio Vanni. The most astute critics have been able to see in Alfredo Rapetti a constant tension and a search that oscillates between East and West, between prayer and mantra, poetry and prose. A sort of natural arrival point, or perhaps new starting point, seemed to have been reached by the invitation in 2007 to exhibit at the 52ndVenice Biennale, in the Syrian Arab Republic Pavilion, on the occasion of the exhibition "Sulle vie di Damasco" (On the road to Damascus), curated byDuccio Trombadori, and in 2011, at the 54th Venice Biennale, with the Italian Pavilion, curated by Vittorio Sgarbi.

Also in 2011 he was invited to exhibit at the 1st Edition of the Brescia Biennale, curated by Silvia Landi, in the rooms of the Museo del Piccolo Miglio.

Studio Guastalla Arte
Via Senato, 24
Milan 20121 Italy
Ph. +39 02 780918
info@guastalla.com
www.guastalla.com

Opening hours
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Except mondays and holidays
Closed from 23 december until 1 January