Riccardo Chicco Biography
Riccardo Chicco was born in 1910 in Turin, at the age of 18 he joined Felice Casorati's school. But at the age of six the desire for painting, alive in him since childhood, began to translate into a commitment to study: first at the traditional school of the landscape and portrait painter Vittorio Cavalleri, then, from the age of fifteen to eighteen, at the much more stimulating one of Giovanni Grande, where he applies himself above all to the nude and the figure. In Casorati's studio he will remain for three years, meeting alongside veterans such as Daphne Maugam and Nella Marchesini, the young people, contemporary or almost the same: Cremona, Bonfantini, Having and Paola Levi Montalcini. In 1931 he made his debut at the Società Promotrice delle Belle Arti of Turin, then traveled extensively in Italy, Paris, London and Monaco.
He returned from London with a deep love for Turner, "the last painter", as he would write many years later, finding him at the Venice Biennale. At the Alte Pinakothek in Munich he studied Rubens, the Flemish, the Venetians of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Paris he attended the Louvre copy school and discovered Cézanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, Dufy, Ensor in person.
He participated in the National Fascist Fine Arts Union Exhibition in Milan from 1938 to 1942.
His first solo exhibition in Turin at the Galleria del Bosco dates back to 1946. But in contrast to the monochromatic classicism of Casorati, Chicco is already the bearer of an instinctive expressionism that matures early in direct contact with painters from beyond the Alps, expressionists and fauvists. It is the discovery of colour, of an explosive use of colour, of a "colour that sings", "that goes wild". Portraits, self-portraits, and even caricatures, reveal the depth of his gaze, his capacity for psychological intuition, in scrutinizing, analyzing, forcing - even to the point of grotesque deformation - the physiognomies of the portraits.
And his looking deeply and revealing the secret of a face is also a profoundly erotic act, albeit of a spiritualized eroticism: it is baring a soul, it is seducing and possessing. In March 1946, presented by Casorati, he ordered his first solo exhibition at the Galleria del Bosco in Turin and immediately afterwards at the V Quadrennial in Rome in 1947 (Figure) and in 1948 (Figures, Figures and lake, Figures in the evening, Colloquio in ombra and Colloquio in luce), 1950 and 1956 he was invited to the Venice Biennale.
Between the mid-1950s and the 1960s, he made frequent stays in Liguria, Genoa, La Spezia, Rapallo, Bordighera, Diano Marina, Albisola, he dealt a lot with ceramics and mosaics, these were years of fervent activity in which Chicco brings his pictorial research and his expressive technique to full maturity.
