RANOCCHI, Augusto

Born in 1931 in Urbino,Italy, Augusto Ranocchi received traditional artistic training from the Instituto di Belle Arti and the Academia di Belle Arti in Rome. Ranocchi worked in Italy as a professor of art and as an artist.  In the artistic experience of Augusto Ranocchi constant attention is given to the value that color assumes in relation to space.  It is the leitmotif that carries through all his work, from early, youthful works of undeclared naturalistic interest created at the end of the forties in Urbino, up to his latest works in which the chromatic register finds its emotive connotation, and is placed as a depth gauge of interior space.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Ranocchi won commissions to create great mosaics, murals and stained glass widows in the churches of Milan, Verona, Rome, Moiano and Nicastro. The theme of love became the dominant trademark of his work, influenced undoubtedly by the large works executed by his religious clientele.  The center of interest is the relationship of man with the dictate of faith. In these early years with his painting, Ranocchi experimented with synthetic figuration with a rather expressionistic emphasis. His synthetic configuration indicated a prevalent orientation towards abstraction.  This was contradicted, however, by a greater figurative balance in his corpulent nudes beginning in the sixties. Ranocchi “models” the forms, resorting to taches of colors put on with a spatula or a large brush.

Bạn đang xem: RANOCCHI, Augusto

In the early 1970s, Ranocchi spent time in the United States and had a show at the Continental Arts Gallery of Detroit (Michigan.) He continued to commissioned works in Italy and Yugosla via during these years. By the second half of the 1970s, Ranocchi’s work takes a more consciously non-figurative turn when he realized paintings of large dimensions at Bracciano and Rome.

In 1980 Ranocchi moved to Los Angeles and the effects of the California lifestyle was reflected in his artwork.  He developed a dynamic contemporary style of vast, powerful color planes, lyrical gestural strokes and strong geometric structure. Cesare Vivaldi wrote of Ranocchi in a catalog for a personal show in the US in 1980, “Ranocchi’s painting is lyrical painting and at the same time of absolute formal consciousness.”  He adds that Ranocchi’s experience is particularly centered as “a painter of memory and dream, of that which the consciousness registers and reflects most vivaciously.”

Xem thêm : Mr. Brainwash

Enrico Crispolti writes in the 2001 book Augusto Ranocchi, “Wherever Ranocchi finds himself painting, he does so by bringing himself back to a definite measure of involving evocation actualized by perception and sensible memory, to which the natural experience appears to be clearly the basis.  In that coincidence his imaginative fullness lives and in it also distinguishes his deepest identity.  And there, too, lies the authenticity of his being as a painter, exactly within the instinctive awareness of tradition of totality, sensorial and pan-like, fulfilling the tradition of painting; of color as a medium of the imagination as much as of manipulation: converging satisfactions.”

Ranocchi did not renounce his desire to look at the universe of things, to propose painting as an extreme attempt to re-conquer, for “the practice of the imaginary” its value as an ethical project.  The colors now re-find their transparence and their reflection: they are free screens that articulate space, measure the distances without falling into the seduction of representation.

Major commissions included canvases for the LAX Hilton and Anaheim Hilton Hotels, the McDonalds corporate art collection and his work was acquired for the luxurious Remington Hotel in Houston. Augusto Ranocchi was proud to be the most commissioned artist by the Vatican in the twentieth century.

Augusto Ranocchi was extremely passionate about painting until his last moments. While suffering from lung cancer the last year of his life, Ranocchi was adamant on painting in his bed similarly to Matisse. Ranocchi died on Christmas Day, December 25, 2011.