Gianfranco Zappettini Biography
Gianfranco Zappettini (Genoa, 16 June 1939) is an Italian painter, among the exponents of Analytical Painting in the seventies. He attended the Nicolò Barabino Art School in Genoa and the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara. In 1961 he participated in the S. Fedele prize in Milan, in 1962 he held his first solo exhibition at the Società di Belle Arti, at the Palazzetto Rosso in Genoa. In the same year he entered the studio of the German architect Konrad Wachsmann (author, among other things, of Albert Einstein's house in Potsdam) in Genoa to design the Italsider skyscraper in via Madre di Dio. The association with Wachsmann, which continued until the following year, it influenced his painting, directing it towards structural research. In 1963 he married Gabriella Gonfiantini and the following year his daughter Martina was born. Also in 1964 he exhibited in Verona (Galleria Ferrari) and Bologna (Galleria 2000) and began his collaborative relationship with the Galleria La Polena in Genoa. He became friends with the artist Mario Nigro, with whom he maintained a long correspondence. In 1968 the German painter Winfred Gaul arrived in Genoa, through whom Zappettini began to frequent the German and Dutch artistic circles. In 1971 he was in fact invited to "Arte concrete", a collective exhibition which took place at the Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster and was curated by the director, the critic Klaus Honnef. Participating in the exhibition are, among others, Lucio Fontana, Enzo Mari, Fausto Melotti, Bruno Munari, Mario Nigro, Mario Radice, Manlio Rho. At the beginning of the seventies, groups of artists took shape in Italy and Europe who worked on the minimal elements of the language of painting. From this common feeling, the so-called New Painting was formed, from which Analytical Painting would later be distinguished, more linked to the analysis of operational means and pictorial processes. Zappettini contributes to it with numerous writings published in Italian and foreign magazines (Gala international, Flash Art, Data, Kunstforum international etc.) and with "white" paintings. The Genoese painter starts from a canvas prepared in black and establishes a specific number of coats of white acrylic mixed with quartz powder that he deems necessary to definitively cover the black; the color is applied with a painter's roller, so as to give anonymity and mechanicalness to the gesture; if black coverage is reached before the pre-established number of hands, the work is considered completed. These works have been exhibited since 1973, for example at the collective "Tempi di perception" (curated by Luigi Lambertini and Lara-Vinca Masini), at the Casa della Cultura in Livorno, and at "A possible future – new painting" (curated by Giorgio Cortenova), at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara. In March 1974 he returned to the Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster for "Geplante Malerei", a collective exhibition organized by Klaus Honnef which would be presented almost entirely again at the Galleria Il Milione in Milan in December of that same year. In 1975 he took part in "Concerning Painting... About painting...", a traveling exhibition in various Dutch museums, and in "Analytische Malerei" at the Galerie La Bertesca in Düsseldorf. In that year, still in Germany, he held a solo show at the Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster and at the Galerie Karsten Greve in Cologne. The artist begins to work on "overlapping canvases": on a first canvas Zappettini delimits a field and fills it with anonymous 2B graphite strokes; on the canvases that are subsequently affixed the dotted surface is reduced until the field is gradually left simply delimited and empty, ready for a new application. In 1977 he was invited to document 6 in Kassel. In 1978 he exhibited in Paris, in the collective "Abstraction Analytique", curated by Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, at the ARC-Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and in Antwerp, in a solo show at the Internationaal Cultureel Centrum. From the end of the seventies Zappettini's life took a new direction. The painter moved to S. Andrea di Rovereto, a town on the heights of Chiavari, in a sort of self-isolation from the international artistic circuits. Even without ceasing his exhibition activity (in 1981 he participated in the exhibition "Pittura in root", curated by Achille Bonito Oliva at the Galleria Artra Studio in Milan and in 1982 in "Pittura di corta memoria", curated by Viana Conti, at Palazzo La Permanent of Milan), undertakes a phase of spiritual research that will lead him to travel between Europe, the Middle East and Africa and to approach disciplines such as Taoism, Zen Buddhism and above all Sufism. After pictorial works in which conceptual distancing and irony predominate and after crossing borders into photography, his works are now inspired by the symbolic world and metaphysics, thanks to the readings of René Guénon. Since the nineties his works have returned to a certain essentiality. In 1998 the Villa Croce Museum of Contemporary Art in Genoa dedicated an anthological exhibition to him. In the 2000s Zappettini concentrated on the symbolism of the warp and weft and on the color blue, which would then also be joined by red, yellow and the return of white. In 2003 he established the Zappettini Foundation for contemporary art in Chiavari which is still dedicated today, in addition to the valorization and archiving of the artist's works, also to the study and research in the field of Analytical Painting and the Seventies.
