Elvio Marchionni Biography
Elvio Marchionni was born in Spello in January 1944. He attended the Bernardino di Betto Art Institute in Perugia where he studied medieval painting techniques in depth. He began painting very early with an incessant experimentation with techniques to depict and represent the harmony of the inner person with the external one who lives and fights in reality. Studies at the Academy and experiences with illustrious personalities of culture and the restoration and conservation of paintings ancient, lead his painting to an awareness of the past as essence and extension into the future. Since the first exhibitions which took place in the 1970s, the study of the ancient masters has been evident, to the point of experimenting with materials worn out by time and the elements. Marchionni extracts the figure from the rough plaster, his idea of beauty: symmetry, balance between masses, shapes, lines and colours. He studies the classics, the divine proportions of the great masters, knows post-war art and the avant-garde that came from America in the 1960s. His conversation with the protagonists of pop art up to the transavantgarde is evident even if he does not go to extremes with bright colors, everything is suffused, light, but nevertheless undeniably present. In the 1980s he exhibited in Paris and Madrid; California, Heidelberg. He celebrates the "strappi" for the first time in 1981 in Foligno, the shades of the support that harmonize, enhancing the subject, giving the whole the mystery of an abstract but readable work. In 1990 he exhibited in Foggia, Belluno and Brindisi. In this period he moved to his new studio and in this space his relationship with "time" takes on a particular connotation: the charm of the stones, the colors of the lime and the mould, the continuity of the memory of the past with the reality of the present find away in the creation of floors. In '99 he became part of the Art'è group for which he illustrated books such as the stories and foils of St. Francis, the Iliad, the Gospels, the Decameron and Orlando Furioso. With the exhibition at the fortress of Vieste in 2004, aesthetic research returns to symbolism and drawing. In Accadìa and Foggia he exhibits in two exhibitions entitled “Strappi” using exclusively old plaster, torn from abandoned houses in Umbria and the Foggia hinterland, as supports. Also in this period he organized the "Opus Art Workshop" in which new young artists were trained, and he experimented with new three-dimensional representation techniques, approaching the sculpture of bas-reliefs. In 2006 he received the commission from the Bishop of Foligno to decorate the apse of the church of Scopoli and the chapel of the Sacrament of the Cathedral of Foligno. In August 2009, another project that Marchionni had long thought about and developed materialised, the creation of the Elvio Marchionni Foundation.
