Renato Natale Chiesa Biography
Renato Chiesa Renato Chiesa is a painter and sculptor with his own unmistakable identity in the panorama of contemporary art. Born in Lecco in 1947, he studied applied arts in France where he also exhibited for several years. Since 1971 he has lived and worked in Milan. His fifty-year career is dotted with countless international awards. His works sold in the most prestigious auction houses are, so far, over 360. In short, he is a very important personality destined to persist in the coming decades, alongside names that are much more famous today. Renato Chiesa is a character who lives by his own light; in short, he has no debts towards historical figures of reference, nor do there exist artistic trends that can clearly classify him. Figurative or abstract for him can also be labels or conventions. What stands out is the energy and unscrupulousness that the artist puts into play. A striking characteristic of Chiesa is precisely his exuberance, the dynamism that his canvases release on a plastic and spatial level. A whirlwind of chromatic variations, like a succession of phantasmagorical waves, which forms the backdrop to the themes that stand out in an almost irreverent way. The sphere is perhaps the leitmotif, almost a mark of recognition for this artist. And indeed his works abound with spheres, captured in all the most disparate perspectives. With a relief, in the true sense of the word, that is very particular. It's like a seasoned billiard player who, with every attempt, through unthinkable trajectories, starting even from the most inconvenient points, always manages to hit the hole. If it is not a background overflowing with vitality that supports, or rather keeps wonderfully afloat, the sphere, it is its precise, absolutely clear shadow. And it is precisely in a play of shadows that the artist's energy folds when, in a somewhat sly move, he refuses to come out into the open. Renato Chiesa, we were saying, likes to surprise, not out of bias, but out of an intuition that knows how to go beyond the observer's expectations. The series of portraits of famous women and men, as well as that of cigarette packs (an autobiographical divertissement), is the equivalent, on a figurative level, of his spherical-abstract representations. But even in this "double somersault" the artist manages to land with ease like a perfect tightrope walker. And it is yet another demonstration of one's intellectual honesty: a spirit that manages to impose itself, re-emerging from the stormy chaos of one's emotions and maintaining its course along a path that is destined to last. ===Paolo Avanzi=== Maestro Renato Natale Chiesa does not need much introduction, because he enjoys wide notoriety. He was born in Lecco in 1947 and, at a very young age, became interested in painting and music. After temporarily attending courses at the Paris Art Institute, he was attracted by the fascinating discovery of the structural upheaval of Cubism, which allowed him to transcend the real data of representation. After the 1970 Biennial, the Historical Archive of Contemporary Arts reopened in Paris and this fact offered Renato Natale Chiesa the opportunity to dedicate himself to the study of the masters of the historical avant-garde. The meeting with Atanasio Soldati, who stayed in Paris for some time. it generated a stimulus that probably influenced subsequent works with bright colors and rigorous formal balance. Thus were born the first "inventions" in which rhythm, colour, light and timbre take on the role of supporting elements and will become a basic constant of all his research. Considerable influence in those years was exerted on Renato Natale Chiesa by Virgilio Guidi for the ideological strength of his creative thought and by Emilio Vedova for the impetus of the gesture that attacked the surface. The discovery of twelve-tone music leads to the appropriation of the principle of "dissonance". suddenly, in this way, the practice of a color freed from any relationship of tone and which took on the exclusive function of timbre. he opened up new and vast horizons, so much so that from that moment until the end of the 1960s his work was an obsessive research into the semantics of gesture, light and timbre. The sound-color relationship, a color that Renato Natale Chiesa, rather than "seeing", loves to "listen to" in its most intimate resonances, allowing him to express himself according to other completely random rules in free autonomy. At the end of the 1960s, marked by the shocking intuitions of Lucio Fontana, whom Renato Natale Chiesa met in Milan on the occasion of one of his exhibitions at the Apollinaire gallery, the gestural turbulence and expressive urgency calmed down and a more reflective dimension took over in the direction of an overcoming of painting itself, with the approach to Gestalt theories on the phenomenology of perception. the principles of optical art informed his research on optical suggestion, due to the phenomenon of retinal conservation of images, until 1978. After a brief crisis following the exhaustion of interest in the principles of structured visuality, in 1980 Renato Natale Chiesa he abandons himself, with renewed energy and enthusiasm, to the rediscovered immediacy of painting, once again exploring the fascinating textures of colour, which rises beyond the dissonances of the '60s. The painting regains the dominant space with a subsequent alternation of color and non-color, of light and darkness that compete on the surface of the work, the black is placed as the light of the darkness, of the void of silence, and leads us to probe the more secret resonances of the non-existent on the invisibility of painting itself. In the continuous dialectic of research, Renato Natale Chiesa proceeds through successive stages of evolution characterized by expansions of chromatic sumptuousness and sudden cancellations of all luminosity in which he concentrates every energy emission in its potential state. This incessant questioning of one's operating methods. io makes him alien to any preconceived stylistic form and makes him take on the "Luminescence" of professional ethics. Through the succession of experiences Renato Natale Chiesa continually pursues the dream of painting with a tension always aimed at regeneration, at catharsis and in more recent years he has re-appropriated the connotations inherent in painting and color no longer inhibited by ideologically closed regimes, but rather with a abandonment totally open and available to the global sphere of feelings.
