Giulio Bartolomei Biography
Giulio Bartolomei was born in 1930 in San Benedetto del Tronto, a small fishing village on Italy's Adriatic coast. His childhood and adolescence were strongly influenced by the natural beauty of his hometown and the tranquility of coastal life. Bartolomei demonstrated from a young age that he had a receptive intellect and great artistic sensitivity. His art is characterized by a wide range of themes, including social and environmental commitment, hippie philosophy and current affairs. He then explored "lighter" genres, such as the ironic reworking of works by great masters of the past and landscape painting, especially representing the Adriatic sea of his hometown. In the 1970s, Bartolomei became interested in the "islands of statues" created by the artist Salvatore Fiume, where groups of sculptures replaced the ground, transforming themselves into a landscape. Bartolomei drew inspiration from this concept for his most famous series, "I scrap rehabilitated", which he exhibited to great public and critical success in Rome in 1983 at the "Together to do" center in Montesacro. In this series, Bartolomei used car wrecks to create a hallucinatory and alienating world, where the ground is entirely replaced by piled up objects. The painting is analytical, cold and objective, the atmosphere almost metaphysical. Bartolomei has tragically highlighted the sense of asphyxiation resulting from the uncontrolled accumulation of urban waste that threatens our daily lives. In his art, Bartolomei explored the dichotomy between progress and return to origins, city and nature, rationality and instinct, oppression and freedom, apathy and passion. He built terrible sets and composed muffled, ambiguous and restless music, which expresses humanity's feelings of alienation and anguish.
