Achille Incerti Biography
Achille Incerti was born on 22 January 1907 in Zurich to immigrant parents, where he remained until the age of nine. His life was marked by a series of illnesses, physical recoveries, and artistic successes, which seemed to follow the trope of the artist tested by life but emerging victorious thanks to his strong calling for art. Incerti's lack of academic training is a significant recurring motif in his artistic development, which leads him to be interpreted as a naive, primitive painter, with an irregular life, whose artistic image emerges from his works. In the mid-1960s, when his name began to circulate, this interpretation consolidated, given that he was seen as the third "primitive" artist from Reggio Emilia whose life experiences were similar to those of Ligabue and Rovesti.
While he devoted himself to painting in a somewhat systematic way during his stay in a sanatorium in the mid-1940s, he later realized that he could not address certain themes with a dialectical language and sought a new syntax that would help him articulate the pictorial discourse in a more appropriate way. . His desire was to deal with his own personality above movements and schools, regardless of programs or statements. For this reason, the pictorial writing he used from the 1960s onwards is difficult to catalog and seems to reflect his hypothesis of building alone a path that began with his involvement in the suffering of the people he met in the sanatorium, all of whom were driven by a strong desire to live. With this spirit he tackles large compositions in which he interprets the malaise of the city and of civilization projected towards the future. Abstraction and symbolism, both based on realism, ultimately proved congenial to him in expressing what he intended to express. Returning to the life of the painter, during the war between Germany, England, France and Russia, with bread and food rationed, the Incerti family moved in 1915 to Reggio Emilia, the father's hometown. In 1923, at the age of sixteen, he went to Milan, where an aunt helped him find work as a decorative assistant. The Milanese years were indisputably formative for him because he had the opportunity to participate in meetings with exponents of the socialist party, including Turati and Treves, who helped him develop that strong social conscience that will manifest itself in his subsequent artistic activity, in particular in his work from the 1960s onwards. Although Incerti's style was initially improvised, he soon tried to give a coherent structure to his images and to characterize them over the years with different pictorial writings, a clear sign of his desire for growth. In the Milan of the 1930s, the legacy of Futurist painting was still evident alongside the followers of the twentieth century, and there were notable creative personalities such as Carlo Carrà and Mario Sironi, but none of these characteristics are found in the "Still Life with Oranges" of Uncertain. which is preserved in the Civic Museums of Reggio Emilia, painted by Incerti in 1930 and attributable to the post-impressionist trend still popular in Italy.
