About him

Francesco Nottolini Painter

It was a true pleasure to be invited by my friend Francesco to present his retrospective, held in the ground-floor rooms of the ancient Da Varano ducal palace in Camerino.
What better venue for an art exhibition than a building born under the sign of art?
On that occasion, I briefly introduced Francesco’s works, specifying that I was culturally distant from the trends of contemporary art, the fruit of mental ruminations rather than the product of careful and meticulous work.
What intrigued me about Francesco’s works, however, was the study that precedes each of his compositions; I have the impression that today the meticulous preparation that accompanied works until the 1950s has disappeared. Contemporary art is more a matter of thought than study. Before beginning a work, Francesco researches, experiments, and then begins the work, much like apprentice craftsmen did in their masters’ workshops, an ancient tradition that has marked the history of art.
I have no doubt that the works of this silent master from the Marche hinterland belong to this specific category. Each work is preceded by precise documentation, first mental and then practical. From the sketch to the first signs of a finished work, it is always accompanied by literary and critical documentation on the subject.
Behind his works lies a long preparation; nothing comes from nothing. The idea of ​​a genius creating from nothing is pure fantasy, not even particularly romantic, because the painters of that movement know well
how much academic study lay behind their works, just as an academic background is clearly behind Francesco’s work. His training at the Academy of Fine Arts in Macerata gave him the opportunity to experiment with any pictorial genre, from graphic design, including engraving, to mixed media, oil and graphic design.
Among his works, the homage to Caravaggio is a set of colors, reinterpreted in a contemporary version, but starting from an objective fact: the pictorial materiality of Caravaggio, a color more Lombard than Roman, because Francesco is more interested in painting the periphery than the center.
His great passion for another great twentieth-century master, also from Lombardy, Morlotti, once again draws him closer to the masters of the past, because behind his earthy colors lie the lessons of the late fifteenth-century Lombards, from Foppa all the way up to Caravaggio.
All this means that Francesco’s works are the result of a long process, using the same process as the masters of the past.
His is a continuous experimentation, which touches on various fields, combining different techniques and materials, with excellent results, as he has recently been doing through the recovery of certain forms of writing.
A final suggestion, an impression that arises from observing his works on nature: those perfect geometries, made of different hues, are those you see standing on a hill and which correspond to the landscape of the Marche, formed by the fields turned over after plowing.
Another great twentieth-century master from the Marche, photographer Mario Giacomelli, loved to capture the same observations, the same details. It would be interesting to see photos and paintings together, to grasp the many insights the unique Marche landscape offers us. Francesco often likes to cite American artists
of the 1950s and 1960s to understand his work, and that’s true, but alongside them coexists that connection, perhaps less obvious because more subtle and hidden, that ideally connects him to the masters of the great Italian tradition.
Angelo Antonelli

Francesco Nottolini

EPIPHANY OF THE SIGN

Black and White, an ideal and symbolic conjunction, aimed at developing along the imperceptible axis of time, in close symbiosis with natural reality and the emotional and sensorial awakenings that have accompanied humanity since its origins. Black and White: opposites meet, extreme boundaries transcend every antithesis, transmigrating into singular morphologies capable of vital and prophetic force. And of a sensitive and intuitive impulse capable of listening to silence, seeing mystery, experiencing the infinite. Into this mental and psychological universe lies the aesthetic investigation of Francesco Nottolini, a painter and printmaker from the Marche region, naturally inclined to combine the basic principles of the point-line-surface of Kandinsky with lively spontaneity and clear expressive freshness. The result is an exclusive and personal verb that is fully realized in the epiphany of the sign that fluidly bursts onto the surface of the paper, tracing the germinating imprint of profound sensations and graceful harmonies. And as if by magic, the color black enters into a close dialogue with the white of the paper, generating multiple and diverse visions that reveal their autonomous identities, whether the artist depicts a flower, a fruit, an interior, a landscape, or when he explores the secret part of being, where thoughts and feelings dance. These intimate motivations inspire the graphic plates, traversed by singular interweavings of form and writing, by recurring symbols and numbers, by maps, ideograms, authorial quotes, and fragmented texts that have the power to transform the anonymous space of the sheet into an unexpected visual territory, pulsating with truth and memory. In this passionate analysis (The Time Machine is a shining example), the boundary between reality and unreality, between the eternal and the transient, becomes inscrutable, so immense is the mystery that surrounds life. From a purely stylistic perspective, Francesco’s clear and measured artistic gesture fits within the vast field of verbal-visual research of a concrete, conceptual, and narrative nature that has developed since the 1950s in various countries. This is a field that Francesco learned to understand and experiment with at the Academy under the expert guidance of Magdalo Mussio, one of the finest European exponents of conceptual art and “visual poetry.” His assiduous association with the master has further deepened their collaboration, even though, artistically and ideologically, he has always maintained a precise linguistic autonomy, far removed from Mussio’s explorations of the emptiness of existence, the memory of the unlived past, and a different truth made of silence and nothingness. Confirmation of this comes from the graphic works in this series, characterized by the sign-word that becomes image and testimony to a creative process aligned with the emergence of mental and psychological urges. However, there are also shifts in automatic drawing and writing (see Stratification), where the very thin line produces vortices of lines that reveal restless, unconscious forms, and where the blackish horizontal stripes are traversed by an intense inner energy that responds to various moods, as is also true of the Surrealists. In Nottolini’s panels, black and white coexist in a morphology that sublimates the poetics of discovery and invention. The idea that white is a luminous color but without hue (an achromatic color) and that black is the absence of color is an irrefutable truth, yet no one misses the specific function of each in the direct perception of reality and the visual translation of emotional resonances. The artist demonstrates great skill in combining the two “non-colors,” black and white, and this allows him to achieve a broad-ranging formal synthesis, where the composite elements harmonize in a carefully calculated grid of signs, lines, and spaces that give polish and definition to the images, both when the declination of Black and White (and the artist’s signature) is endlessly reiterated, and when the sign gives rise to geometric shapes, small glimpses of nature (three trees, a row of pine trees, a farmhouse, cultivated land), a black Scottish Terrier and his white alter ego, as if to articulate the eternal conflict between night and day, between darkness and light, between evil and good. The sequence of drawings (the first and fourth appear very surreal with the bales transformed into tense, almost torn faces) ends with a construction of “black and white” writing that on one side tapers and goes beyond the four-leaf clover crosses, connecting with the overlying “black and white” sequence. A reiterated artifice that gives tone and definition to the symbolic panel of drawings. Upon closer inspection, the landscape theme never leaves the scene and develops with a sparkling corollary of images, now rendered through photographic abstraction.
Alvaro Valentini

WHEN THE FORM DISSOLVES AND THE COLOR REMAINS

Francesco Nottolini is a young artist who paints with rigor and talent, creating works of great intensity and depth. His landscapes and nature, portrayed in their bright, fiery hues, are reminiscent of the beautiful views of the Marche region, with its rolling hills and multi-hued cultivated fields. But observing Nottolini’s work, one realizes how he has “studied” the greats of the past, particularly Cézanne in his later period, when the great French master dissolved form into color, creating works a stone’s throw from Expressionism. And it is a contemporary Expressionism that inspires our artist, who uses bright, contrasting colors, abundant in the so-called “black stripes” so dear to the movement born in Germany. Nottolini’s works are profound, revealing the importance of manual skill, of artistic “making,” which portrays reality by transfiguring it through sensations. The great protagonist is light, which corrodes, illuminates, blurs, and caresses forms and colors, making them alive and vibrant, as if traversed by a thrill of great passion. What shines through his canvases is his passion and love for what surrounds the artist, making him part of a context and part of the story. His forms navigate a sea of ​​color, of matter, which thickens or dilutes depending on the intensity of his emotion. Indeed, Nottolini’s painting is not just form and color, line and circle, but also and above all emotion, sensuality, and passion. It is a way out of the ugliness of reality, from the daily routine that shatters any poetry, becoming a hymn to life and beauty to which no one can remain indifferent. One of the primordial and most powerful means of human expression, painting, was and remains the greatest vehicle of emotion and testimony that humanity has ever had throughout its history. Even today, in the age of powerful media, it remains fascinating and mysterious, and young artists like Nottolini keep it alive with their sensitivity and talent. Francesco Nottolini is also the author of beautiful black-and-white graphics, where the poetics of full and empty prevail, with an almost musical alternation of positive and negative spaces that combine to form the figure. The humans and animals he portrays seem to retain their vitality, almost forced to compress it to fit within the canvas, which they thus animate with a tremor of passion. Horses, one of his favorite subjects, appear mechanical, made of iron, almost robotic, so much so that their anatomy has been studied and analyzed in detail, as if to discover the source of such power and courage. These works have a remarkable expressive force that captures the vision and creates a story for these figures that are so prominent. What dominates Nottolini’s graphics is the curved line that seems to enclose all forms, almost in a magical circle from which life emanates. And it is the curve that fills the canvas, forming the full and empty spaces, the contrasts, which give plasticity and vigor. The human figures, unlike the animals, are treated with great sweetness and poetry, as are the portraits, which reveal a healthy dose of irony. While the depiction of horses almost echoes Picasso’s “Guemica,” in the portraits and human figures there is the sweetness of the poet, the refinement of talent, the irony of the artist. Francesco Nottolini creates oils and graphics by recovering the common thread of art history, in a research that evolves along a marked path, without going astray or renewing itself at all costs. What is most to be admired is the artist’s consistency and philological honesty. He does not submit to trends or, worse, to the market, but creates because it is an intrinsic necessity of his being, and he does so with the means of culture and constant study, without improvisation, but with method and research. Nottolini is a young artist who draws inspiration from the great masters through talent and a reminder that it is important to know one’s roots, one’s origins, in order to move forward, ever further with research and experimentation. Contemporary art needs young and consistent artists who, with study and passion, experiment, to finally create the artistic movement of the second millennium, which is struggling to identify among the many currents of thought that crowd contemporary art. Nottolini’s art thus proves to be an important building block for the construction of a new way of creating, in tune with the contemporary age in the constant search for the best expression.
Noemi Gambini

EMOTION IN IMAGE

Creating a graphic or pictorial equivalent for every emotion derived from the vision of reality: this is Francesco Nottolini’s passion, a passion that, over time and with the maturation of his experience, has consolidated into a true artistic vocation. It is based on a need, which is the fundamental need of art: the transfiguration of reality, its conceptual and poetic elaboration, and the sharing of the emotion that comes from experiencing it. All these reasons are closely related to interiority and appear, in this specific case, particularly driven by a desire for perpetuation and memory. Significant graphic and pictorial experience, gained “by doing” and supported by serious theoretical and academic training, allows Francesco Nottolini to achieve his artistic goal with such formal completeness that the image produced appears as an autonomous creation, almost detached from the situation that gave rise to it. The transfiguration to which reality is subjected is influenced by such a remarkable visual refinement that it takes shape within it: this is the sensation that spontaneously arises when observing several of Nottolini’s works. But, of course, this observation is general and is not intended to reduce the creative phenomenon to its formal aspect alone, nor to diminish its poetic foundation, since each image also proves effective in terms of expressiveness. Nottolini uses color and even black and white like an alchemist of ancient tradition, for precious textures that invariably translate into sensations. The graphic style and composition are always studied for a synthetic result capable of intensifying the timing and methods of enjoyment, “guiding” attention in the desired direction. Among the various themes addressed, “the journey” stands out for its frequency and representative commitment. Color and sign, in Nottolini’s works that relate to his itinerant journey, become instruments of evocation and memory. His “destinations” could be situations and characters, but more often they take the form of “places.” A glance at some of the titles is enough to realize this: “Eastern Winds,” “Metropolis,” “Spain,” “Sicily,” “The Great Mountain,” etc.: landscape is certainly the element that, more than any other, stirs Nottolini’s soul to expressiveness and memory. The resulting landscape is one in which the naturalistic element is merely a starting point, in the sense that it then comes to life and transforms dynamically and conceptually, becoming an “image.” And through the interplay of lines and geometries, a sort of perspective stratification emerges, whose virtual dynamism also recalls the passing of seasons and eras. The temporal aspect is often identified with a layered spatial transcription that gives rise to a “composite” where, rather than direct emotion, memory and the evocation of a story have a greater place. Naturally, this jumble of sensations also includes personal memories and diary-like notes. Other times, objects and things, so-called “still lifes,” arouse in Nottolini a need for reflection, or “pauses” that more explicitly evoke an intimate desire for poetry. In short, it can be said that the visual narrative Nottolini offers us is unfinished and “in progress,” but the tools at his disposal, combined naturally with a remarkable sensitivity, guarantee an artistic result that is already clearly evident and destined, hopefully, to grow over time.
Lucio Del Gobbo

“PAINTING IS FOR YOURSELF…”

The sense of landscape was born with painting, but with a type of painting that increasingly seeks to respond to private needs for understanding and memorizing lived experiences. Landscape is the equivalent of the frame with which we select a portion of nature to isolate it from a general, indefinable context. It is the way to define the boundless and therefore, ultimately, it is a device for seeing. Seeing, precisely, because if the boundless, the expanse unperceptible to the eye, is the cause of suffering mixed with attraction to the infinite, conversely, a limited portion of space seeks to satisfy the desire for infinity within the dimensions of the frame. Thus, what Francesco Nottolini says about painting is more telling than ever: “Painting is for oneself…” Painting landscapes (but not only) serves above all to see oneself again in a place, to be able to still inhabit it, to fix its memory, or rather to circumscribe—once again—a limited portion of time in the infinite flow of events. It is therefore easy to find a substantial affinity between this intentionality of painting and photography, beyond the obvious linguistic differences. That is, between the circumscribing of personal emotions through the photographic medium that transforms the “skin” of things into icons of an experience (the travel photograph, for example), and the painting that constructs these icons with the intent of giving emotions the continuity and consistency of things still alive. The view, then, which arose from a rib of the landscape tradition, along with a taste for travel and discovery, and a desire to archive his own travel experiences, continues in Nottolini’s memories of fragments of landscape, meteorological sensations, and constructions tending to bring together stimuli that derive from, for example, the encounter on the horizon between a cloud cover and the squareness of a cultivated field. The painter assembles these stimuli rather than constructs them, as if the captured images were notes from a private memory, before everything disappears, forever. This is perhaps precisely the characteristic of Nottolini’s works: they exist in an intermediate zone between the search for the structure of sensations and the presence of a personal pleasure that cannot be reduced to the mere pursuit of compositional structures, of stable perceptions. This characteristic makes the use of the medium of art contemporary, even with clear references to the modern tradition of the sense of nature: from Cézanne to Expressionism, to Klee (above all). The freshness of the personal detail, even the autobiographical anecdote, extol these historical references that can no longer be anything other than imbedded, collective, and distant memory: History. The frequent use of techniques and materials such as pencil or ink on paper, the agility of formats on the prototype of the page, are therefore those means whose “lightness” is necessary to render ephemeral memories like the flight of a kite or a small chromatic detail that breaks the massive mass of a great mountain, or signs-writings that transform the very meaning of tree roots into the personal value of memories. These are ways to transition from the pursuit of rigorous compositional structures to the “epigrammatic” value of travel notes, of “drawings” for a notebook of memory. Memories—if we wish to use this propensity of the spirit as one of the possible keys to understanding these works—are in fact sensations that endure, that linger, still for a while in the eyes or on the skin, that linger in scents, while maintaining a natural vocation for fading. Perhaps for this reason, the edges of the compositions circumscribe, once again, a landscape-memory, while leaving the boundaries “transparent,” always open, so that everything can—as it flows—appear and vanish, as is natural.
Prof. Franco Speroni
Professor of Art History at the Academy of Fine Arts of Macerata

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