Mario Chianese Biography
Mario Chianese was born in Sampierdarena in 1928, son of the artist Nicolò Chianese. From a young age, he showed a great interest in painting and took advantage of his domestic teachings and then those of Antonio Mario Canepa, Ave Bassano and Antonio Schiaffino. In 1950, he held his first solo exhibition at the Rotta gallery and, the following year, he brought the exhibition to Milan at the Ranzini gallery, where he gained great recognition from critics such as Leonardo Borghese, Vincenzo Costantini, Arrigo Angiolini, Aurelio Belloccio, Giuseppe Grazzini, Emilio Zanzi and Giovanni Riva. In 1959, he was awarded the Biella prize and, in the same year, he was proposed to the VIII Quadrennial in Rome by the jury chaired by Felice Casorati. In the 1960s, Chianese was part of the group of painters who started the activity of the La Polena gallery, where he had the opportunity to compare himself with other artistic realities of the time and to gather stimuli for his artistic research. Despite the production of portraits and still lifes, his artistic research has always focused on nature, which has been the object of his research at all times, even when he experimented with the combination of samples of raw materials with painted landscapes or to the sequence of multiple images taken from different points of view and at different times. In 1972, Chianese moved to Monterosso (SP), where he conducted the light-color study to the extreme. Subsequently, he decided to return to nature and the direct inspiration of the landscape, also incorporating elements of conceptualization.
In 1979, Chianese was elected academician of merit of the Ligustica Academy of Fine Arts in Genoa and in the same year he was awarded the chair of painting, which he held until 1997. Over the years, his art has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions and has received recognition from critics and collectors, including Matteo Bianchi and Guido Giubbini.
In 2011, Chianese participated in the Ligurian Biennial of Contemporary Art in Venice, proposed by Vittorio Sgarbi as the inaugural exhibition of the newly restored Palazzo della Meridiana in Genoa. In 2017, he inaugurated the anthological exhibition "Time, light, earth, memory" at the Spazio Don Chisciotte of the Bottari Lattes Foundation in Turin, in which over sixty years of studies and painting on nature were represented.
Chianese was a great lover of Ligurian painting of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and owned a collection of works by authors such as Ernesto Rayper, Santo Bertelli, Rubaldo Merello and Giovanni Battista Derchi. He was also one of the most important experts and collectors of Dante Conte's work. His art is a painting of nature in which little space is left to man-made structures and every topic is always taken from life.
