Bruno Zoppetti Biography
Bruno Zoppetti is an artist who began his career as a figurative painter, then moving on to an informal period in the 1990s, before returning, in the early 2000s, to figurative painting. His return to figures occurred following a trip to the South of the United States, to the Mississippi Delta, where he was able to immerse himself in the atmosphere of the mythical places that gave rise to black American music. Here he had the opportunity to know and represent through his expressive language the sounds, light, desperation and misery of its African-American inhabitants, thus fitting into the great tradition of Western portraiture that goes from the portraits of the Fayyum to Lucian Freud.
The series of works dedicated to the portraits of the artists of the Mississippi Delta is striking for the great variety of compositional solutions and chromatic choices adopted by Zoppetti. The unity of inspiration among artists does not prevent the creation of a wide range of musical styles and performance techniques.
Although there is a common delimitation in the choice of the subject, the series shows a notable stylistic variation between the more distant portraits ("John Dee Holeman" and "Thelonious Monk", both 2010) and the more recent ones. In particular, the former are characterized by their faster processing and brighter colours, while in the more recent ones the monochromatic background becomes a less elaborate presence.
Despite the presence of these stylistic differences, we cannot speak of a sensible and linear evolution of Zoppetti's work, as the concept of evolution can be considered unrealistic in the artistic field.
