CLAUDIO GRANAROLI: GREAT LANDSCAPES Landscapes? It could be said that calling these abstract compositions by Claudio Granaroli landscapes is forced, far-fetched and specious. And yet it seems to me the most appropriate term. Though the works express nothing about landscape that is traditional, descriptive or natural, they do contain something of landscape in their structure: there is a low area and a high area, which could be a sky; they give an impression of open spaces and immersion in nature. However, rather than describing, they allude, evoke, and translate – in explosions of colour – emotions triggered by different places, and what triumphs, it seems to me, is the desire to recreate the surprise – I would almost say the stupefaction – experienced the moment the landscapes revealed themselves to the painter. Surely this has happened to everyone at least once: to turn a bend in a road and be left breathless before an unexpected or astonishing view, even an ugly one. In the same way, surely everyone remembers a place for its odour, whether it was an intoxicating perfume or an unbearable smell. I feel Granaroli sought to paint these things in his series of large triptychs; indeed, he has given some of them titles that refer to places, like Tra Scilla e Cariddi: this is one of the strongest works in the series, with its intense blues and brushstrokes that intertwine in a whirling motion, and that evoke, for anyone who has navigated that stretch of land and is thus familiar with it, the incessant clash of currents and the resulting pungent, briny odour. The chromatically rich triptych entitled Notturno is also a strong work, which for me irresistibly evokes the perfume of orange blossom, of the fresh night breeze that in a garden makes grass quiver and leaves rustle. These paintings certainly come from a journey, from Bergamo to the south of Italy, and then to the Egadi Islands, and I imagine that during the trip the painter allowed himself to be surprised by what he saw. It is not easy to let ourselves be surprised, as we are increasingly distracted and hurried travellers; to be able to do so we need to know how to let go. I cannot help thinking of the astonished eyes of Northern European artists during their eighteenth and nineteenth century Grand Tour as they looked at Italian landscapes, at the blinding light and intense colours of the south, and it seems to me that Granaroli has in some way relived those emotions. However, in addition to the allusions, evocations, and suggestions of a painter-traveller nurtured on history and literature, there is “painting” in and of itself, the broad gestures on the canvas, the depth and harmony of colour, in other words, that extraordinary thing called the work of art, which springs from individual experience but then entrusts – to the observer’s experience and sensitivity – its unique reality of forms and colours, rhythms and dimensions that do not translate reality but create a new one. In yet another series of recent works, which we might call “windows”, Granaroli reinvents a genre which has a long history behind it. Yes he reinvents, because instead of adopting the window in the traditional way as a border between the viewer and the space that unfolds beyond, in other words a diaphragm through which to isolate a portion of the world, Granaroli seems to dive into the space he paints, in such a way that he does not define the window’s frame as a border but rather involves the very frame in the work itself by painting it and making it an integral part of a space. The intense blacks the painter nearly always places at the centre of these works exert a strong attraction to the viewer’s eyes and, as in the large triptychs, accentuate the impression of immersion and sinking into space. Anna Finocchi