GIAMPIERO MONTANARI / pittore e scultore

You could lose yourself in the studio, which raises the question: how is the artist able to give logical order to heaps of elements, together with things so diverse they could make up a disorganised charity shop. Many of the objects come from raiding second hand markets. Montanari spends many hours amongst phonographs, old locks, irons, musical instruments, books and lights. His main interest revolves around frames, which are adapted to his own paintings. He collects prints with drenched old borders and old texts, one that includes an Austrian code of civil rights, from the Nineteenth Century, printed for the Republic of Venice. Finding oneself in the organised dispersion of a flea market, means travelling to one’s favourite places, those of memories. One day, in Savigno, he found some albums with notes from girls, books embellished with drawings and dry flowers, diaries where young women recorded emotions and unrequited love. They are notebooks that the artist occasionally picks out of the heap of things, to evoke moments connected with a time he does not know, but he can imagine by reading a sentence, a name, or by caressing a pressed flower: the romantic archive of a stranger. Poetry, is the title, written in Indian ink on the cover of one of these books. Around the writing is a watercolour of light coloured flowers and a slender bird on a branch. It begins with a page dated 29th July 1890: a nice handwriting recalls a romance called Think… The tones are languorous, and words are like twilight sounds that can barely be heard “…When together with the breath of zephyr / The last note you will hear of my malady / Think, girl, think of my torture / Think that I cry of the lost ardency”. Poetry and dedications are punctuated with flowers and leaves, giving more lyrical substance to the expressions. One page ends with an ivy leaf stuck to a dedication: “In your pretty pink album of girl / Amongst the pleasant wishes, kisses and smiles / Of thousand pretty flowers / Of the most gentle fragrances / Let this leaf that will never fade / In the passage of time and distance / Speak to you of love…”