Enrico Fereoli Biography
Enrico Fereoli was born in Sala Baganza in 1901 and had an education up to the fourth grade. He worked as a barber and carpenter in shops before becoming a "bollista" in tomato processing during the summer season. He continued these works occasionally until an illness forced him to stop in February 1958. In 1960, during the period of convalescence, his son urged him to paint and Fereoli began his adventure as a painter.
Fereoli's painting is characterized by a "naiveté" nourished by an authentic passion for painting, focusing on the favorite themes of Sala Baganza and its popular, rural or rustic environments. His sincere talent, difficult to define naïve according to the canons of naïve painting, developed hand in hand with life experiences.
The recognition of his artistic work came by chance when a social worker saw his paintings in his home and spoke about them to the critic Aristide Barilli. Barilli agreed with the positive opinion and his first exhibition, at over sixty years of age, was presented in the community centre. Thanks to the joint interest of Barilli, the architect Lusignoli, the sculptor Mazzacurati and others, the name of Fereoli reached Rome, where a large collective exhibition of Italian and French naïfs was inaugurated inside Palazzo Barberini, where the artist participates with the exhibition of some of his works.
From a small craftsman to a naïve painter almost by chance, he came to be nominated by national and foreign critics: even the critic Arsen Pohribny, in love with his paintings, went in person to that modest home recognizing in Fereoli a painter of popular reality who, « outside the strict canons of naive painting by its very definition, he was able to make it a place apart, capturing life with the purity of ideas and forms". Other works will follow, panoramas of the colorful houses on this side of the water, civil recognition until 1991, when he passed away at the age of eighty-nine, bearer to the last of a solid anti-fascist morality that emerges from the memories of the past, in those memories of the years youth, when the violence of the fascists was countered by the indomitable libertarian spirit of the inhabitants of Sala who in 1922 erected a barricade on the access road to the town to defend its people using bags filled with Baganza sand.
On this theme extracted from the sphere of the depths, the pictorial cycle presented here of the Barricades was born in the 1980s.
