Guido Baldessari Biography
VENICE (1938-2016) Guido Baldessari was born on 10 February 1938 in Venice in Campo S. Samuele. Having graduated in June 1959 as a Master of Art, while still continuing to paint, on the advice of his teacher Maragutti, for a year he deepened his experience on a technical level at the "Alfa Studio" design studio, near Rialto, where he created writings and drawings for advertising. And at the same time he enrolled in the Scuola Libera del Nudo of the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, where he met and got to know the artists Bruno Saetti and Carmelo Zotti. Having completed his studies, from 1959 to 1960 the twenty-year-old Baldessari worked as a decorator at the "Ceramiche San Polo" company directed by Prof. Rosa, where he learned and deepened his knowledge of the art of decoration and the use of colors for ceramics. As this year passes, the old genre of painting is destined to change. The artist, guest of an antique dealer friend of his father, near Erta Canina (in Florence) breathes the Tuscan air and has the opportunity to observe the works of historical artists, capturing atmospheres, lights and geometries which he will then infuse into his future works. In 1960 he left for military service and was sent to Martina Franca in Puglia. This place significantly changed Baldessari's concept of art. In fact, in his moments of free time, while he reproduces the beautiful trulli of Alberobello in watercolor and pencil, he becomes progressively fascinated by the chromatic compositions of the stones that make up the walls of the houses. This fascination leads him to leave aside the verist and realist approach, concentrating totally on the geometric data, now used as a substrate to create a symbolic world, from which inner dreams and fantasies emerge with dreamlike references, but always linked to the colorful range of Venetian origins. Returning to Venice in the first months of 1962, with this new pictorial concept, he was hired as a set designer at the "La Fenice" theater in Venice. In this environment, also guided by the experience and skill of the talented professor Antonio Orlandini, professor of scenography at the city's Academy of Fine Arts, he has the opportunity not only to work in a creative field but also to meet various talented personalities of the world of culture and entertainment at a global level, to increase their technical knowledge. Therefore the ability to fill executive needs to build exciting baroque scenography, as for "Alcina" by F. Zeffirelli, or suggestive as for "Mother Courage" by B. Breckt, or "Tristan and Isolde" by G. Manzù , allows him to gain strong design and implementation experience which he also uses to create his works as well as deepen his research in the artistic field. The greatest technical enrichments derive from the optics experiments that he has the opportunity to carry out during the tests before the official debut of the works, in which he can observe the translations and refractions originating from the beams of light that hit scenes and objects. In 1964 Baldessari's research made further progress. The enchanted treatments give way to the depiction of imaginative and sometimes truthful faces. It is not a question of a rethinking towards realism, but of an expressiveness aimed at making the coloristic materiality triumph compared to the previous writing, as evidenced by his dreamlike cardinals. In the middle of the same year, the artist experienced a crucial moment characterized by great changes. In fact, despite experimenting with the old methods, there is still another evolution in him, due to the relationship that he, as a good Venetian, has with the sea and in particular with the seabed. Always passionate about underwater fishing, attracted by the colors and features of shells, algae, starfish and anemones, he decides to take them to insert them inside a bottle and then study their vital movements, reflections and reverberations that the light creates when he hits them and finally bring them back to the canvas. These new visual cues and, above all, the new forms, allow him to inaugurate a pictorial cycle called "Ontogenesis", in which his extrapolations emerge from the dynamic and luminous sinuosities of these microcosms.
