Guido Pinzani Biography
Born in Florence on 3 January 1940. He inherited his love for art and literature from his father Onorato, cartographer at the Military Geographic Institute and from his maternal grandfather, editor for the Le Monnier publishing house. At a very young age he began to model the clay that the workers of the kilns in Campo Marte provided him - the Florentine neighborhood where he lived - becoming so passionate about it that he wanted to cultivate this passion. So in the 1950s he decided to enroll at the Art School of Florence where he studied painting with the masters Guido Peyron, Silvio Pucci, Piero Bugiani, Renzo Agostini and sculpture with the Bolognese Quinto Ghermandi, fundamental for his stylistic orientation. In this period the school, still traditional, is attended by a few selected students, who show all their enthusiasm in learning artistic and cultural disciplines, so even the teachers are able to transmit their experiences more easily. At the same time as his school years he attended the stonecutters of the Maiano quarries and it was in this phase that he learned to hew stone, creating his first works, including some heads that recall the Caryatids of Amedeo Modigliani, an artist he greatly appreciated and to whom he would dedicate his his degree thesis. The experience acquired in Maiano is relevant for Pinzani because it brings him closer to the artisanal way of working with sculpture, a principle that will characterize all his artistic production. During these formative years he read “SeleArte”, a bimonthly magazine of international culture and artistic information, founded in 1952 by Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti. Thanks to this magazine, which represents an important point of reference for young artists and scholars, Pinzani discovers the painter Oskar Schlemmer, by whom he is fascinated, the Austrian sculptor Fritz Wotruba, Japanese graphic designers and his future teacher Alberto Viani. From a literary point of view he formed a strong friendship with the poet Renzo Gherardini, who had been his teacher in middle school, and who introduced him to the reading of the classics and modern poetry. After completing his studies at high school he would like to move to Milan to study with the sculptor Marino Marini, but the teacher is often away from the teaching activity which remains entrusted to assistants. So, with Ghermandi's advice and a letter of introduction, he went to Venice where he attended the Academy of Fine Arts with maestro Viani. Pinzani, who had already been able to appreciate the works of this sculptor in "SeleArte", was struck by "the refined language" and the "extremely simple vision of plastic". In Venice, in addition to finding a great artist, he met an excellent teacher who left the students free to engage in an intellectual dialogue with the past. In fact, Pinzani said that the sculpture classroom, continuously open, was covered with large frames with photos of everyone's sculptures. the times, from prehistory to the contemporary age, annotated by critical interventions by the master. In 1959, at Viani's suggestion, he visited a solo show by the Milanese sculptor Lorenzo Guerrini in the Venetian Galleria del Cavallino. The contact with the work of Guerrini, also influenced by the Austrian Wotruba, will be decisive for his future artistic developments, especially towards a non-figurative sculptural language, which arises from the superposition of simple volumes. In Pinzani's eyes, the Venetian environment immediately appears "full of nuances, shadows and lights", characterized by a strong open-mindedness, so much so that, to encourage study, young artists were allowed free access to the library of the Biennial. For Pinzani these were unforgettable years. In 1967 he went to Bochum, where he stayed for almost a year, created some sculptures in volcanic stone and took part in an exhibition at the University. After the trip to Germany he returned to Florence and continued to maintain contact with maestro Viani, whom he considered a spiritual father, a great man of culture. In these years, despite remaining deliberately isolated from the Florentine intellectual environment, he met Raffaele Monti (through Alfredo Righi) and Renzo Federici with whom he opened a fruitful cultural exchange that would contribute to enriching his stylistic and formal research towards the creation of works full of traditional artistic references, ranging from West to East. In this period he began working on the samurai series, a recurring theme in his artistic production to this day. The passion for the Ronin, samurai without a master, was born from the curiosity to discover the oriental world of the films Rash'mon (1950) and The Seven Samurai (1954) by Akira Kurosawa, by which he was struck, but above all from the interest in the graphics of Japanese prints that illustrate a world of hero-warriors that fascinate him. Viani is aware of this research and approves it, so Pinzani continuously updates him on developments as documented in the correspondence between the two. In 1969 he became assistant to the sculptor Raffaello Scianca at the Academy of Fine Arts in Urbino (until 1972). These are the years of conceptual and poor art, many teachers share these two artistic currents so the great creative freedom granted to students and their consequent artistic disorientation appears alive. In a climate in which the training experience of the old Academy now seems to be lacking, Pinzani feels uncomfortable and is unable to follow the young artists as he would like. In recent years, however, he meets the philosopher Rosario Assunto, professor of aesthetics at the University of Urbino, with whom he can interact culturally and thanks to whom he manages to create a "defense dam". For Pinzani, Assunto is an important person, a man of great intelligence and open-mindedness, so much so that he invites him to the Academy to hold a conference on art and even today, with great bitterness, he cannot forget the protest that teachers and students expressed the precepts illustrated by the philosopher, who managed to finish the speech with great difficulty. For Pinzani, the attitude full of excessive modernism with which Assunto was welcomed remains incomprehensible to the detriment of an education that should have developed gradually, starting from the teaching of drawing and art history and then, with time and experience, being able to provide young artists with the means to develop an innovative language. The fortunate meeting with the engraver Renato Bruscaglia, director of the Academy from 1967 to 1970, who introduced Pinzani to engraving, dates back to Urbino; in this period he began to create the landscapes of the Marche, which he was particularly attracted to both for the mystery they instill and for the irrationality that distinguishes them. They are engravings characterized by a strong chiaroscuro contrast, by the exaltation of environments, mainly nocturnal, from which a mystical dimension emerges that invites the observer to reflect on the grandeur of nature. The moon, a recurring female symbol, is the only true protagonist of some landscape scenes invaded by a sense of "silence, solitude and spirituality" towards the continuous search for a Genius Loci. After his experience in the Marche he returned to Florence and won the competition to teach at the Art School; for a year he also taught sculpture at the State Institute of Art. In these years he became friends with the painters Franco Brogi, Enzo Faraoni and Alessandro Nocentini, with whom he exhibited in 1986 at the municipal halls of the Logge Vasari in Arezzo. In his free moments he is constantly traveling between Florence and his beloved Urbino, "after all", as Federici writes, "he never stays in one place: his old Ford is a bit like the badge that solidly associates him with that generation , now in his forties, who felt the automobile as an enormous liberation” (Renzo Federici, Guido Pinzani, exhibition cat., Galleria Rossi, Parma, 1983). In Urbino he was in contact with his painter friend Adolfo Paolucci, with whom he had already exhibited in a collective exhibition in 1972 on the occasion of the XXII Edition of the International Prize for Painting, Sculpture, Graphics and Artist's Book “GB Salvi” and “Piccola Europa” in Sassoferrato, and with the Franciscan friars of San Bernardino, who made a studio available to him at the convent. Among the friars there are philosophers, theologians, historians of medieval religion sensitive to art, with the desire to create a collection of their collection of watercolours, prints, paintings, engravings and sculptures by artists mainly from the Marche and Tuscany; for this operation they entrusted themselves to Pinzani who helped them found the museum of which he would be director. The link with the Marche environments, fundamental for his artistic inspiration, begins to weaken recently, when the religious nucleus of San Bernardino, with which he is in full harmony, was transferred and, in the absence of interested personalities, the collection, unfortunately , is dismembered. In 1998 he concluded his experience as a teacher with a bit of disappointment: he had long since realized that the masters of the past no longer exist, artists only play the role of teachers and, with the advent of mass education, the selection necessary to identify gifted students is lacking. In this situation of excess school population, where even the best are unable to emerge and many are indifferent to aesthetic research, he is unable to find students to follow. For some years he has been a member of the Sculpture Class of the Academy of Drawing Arts in Florence and has participated in two exhibitions at the Exhibition Hall: the first in 1999 on the occasion of a collective exhibition in which the works of the sculptors of the Academy divided into two sections, one contemporary, the other historical and in 2007 together with the sculptors Antonio Di Tommaso, Gabriele Perugini and Antonio Violano. In 2001 he came into contact with the Open Art Gallery in Prato and took part, with the Torso ceramic from 1998, in the collective Arte Internazionale a Prato. Paintings–Watercolours–Drawings–Sculptures; in 2003 he participated with Studio per un Ronin (watercolor and ink on paper, 2002) and Yazama Shinroku Mitsukase (painted wood, 2003) in the De statua exhibition. Aspects of Italian Sculpture of the Twentieth Century, promoted by the same Gallery where his works are permanently exhibited.
