About the artist:

Elio Pelizzati was born in Sondrio on September 20, 1942. His artistic career began to take shape at a young age. Elio Pelizzatti began his artistic career in the early 1960s. He was torn between architecture and painting. He chose—or was forced to choose—the latter (though his desire for architecture would always be evident, even in his less compositionally structured works).

He was very young. He sensed that the artistic climate in Valtellina at that time was singularly favorable. But he was restless and already searching for his own path. He wasn't, however, seeking the shortest path, nor an ambiguous, immediate expressive autonomy. Despite his (apparently) closed nature, he was culturally open. And Elio Pelizzatti built his artistic identity by embracing the lessons of contemporary masters—first French, then Italian—discovering the innovative message of even those less celebrated at the time. He fearlessly declared himself influenced by them. He accepted and embraced their "contaminations," demonstrating their fertility.

To get closer to these sources, he changed his surroundings. From 1961 to 1964, he lived in Paris. Then he returned to Valtellina. However, he frequented the Milanese artistic scene, associating with painters most sensitive to existential issues. In those years, he researched, delving deeply to reveal the anxiety and drama hidden in everyday scenes. He followed the same path as the painters—especially Milanese—protagonists of so-called "existential realism" (Banchieri, Ferroni, Cappelli), sometimes addressing their same themes (the theme of "waste," for example).

His landscapes now resemble Vespignani's degraded, corroded suburbs more than the watercolors of a still-untouched nature. The desolate interiors belong not to the rural world, but to the urban one. His themes, uncomfortable, often disturbing, are apparently foreign to the Valtellina context. A realism, often scathing and with formal outcomes that were anything but predictable, has long characterized the intensity of his painting (but for a long time it has not facilitated easy commercial opportunities).

Elio Pelizzatti's pictorial journey has no trace of informal pauses. Abstraction, however, seems to permeate him when his proximity to the art of Alberto Giacometti becomes more intense. Form tends to disappear. The figure recedes from the scene. The image abstracts. But only to make way for its essence or the traces of its memory. Then it reappears with the impact of the "New Figuration."

In recent years, Elio Pelizzatti's painting has reconnected with the Valtellina region. The landscape of the valleys reappears in forms and colors that are at times almost idyllic. However, even in the glimpses painted in the colors of summer or the frigid light of winter, alongside the enchantment of nature, a suffused melancholy emerges.

In his latest works—a cycle he intended to conclude as a vast fresco of the high mountains (the Bernina, Disgrazia, and Badile groups)—his "realism" seems to verge, through the meticulous execution and scrupulous attention to detail, on the verge of "hyperrealism." Yet those peaks—abstract despite their imposing physicality, the solitude of their silences, the blinding whiteness of the glaciers—lead to the confines of the invisible.

In his restless yet systematic research, Elio Pelizzatti essentially experimented with every expressive medium: from oil painting to pastel, from drawing to serial graphics (the latter technique in which he was a pioneer in Valtellina, demonstrating at the same time a scrupulous and refined mastery). His artistic production, wide-ranging and quantitatively significant, explored all genres of painting: the figure—sometimes portrait—landscape, still life. He approached them seeking not only their deepest expressiveness, but above all their relationships. Indeed, he often developed the various themes with compositional and conceptual originality, uniting them or, conversely, expanding them.

The figure usually does not appear in isolation. It enters the scene of the "interiors" as well as the "exteriors." It appears collected, enveloped in the forms of characters hidden in their shadows. It shines through features that are still human, but about to dissolve, and that lightly traverse—sometimes seemingly only with the transparency of their souls—disoriented landscapes. Or it enters clearly into landscapes, interiors, and even still lifes, through the luminous flesh tones—painted or engraved—of sensual nudes.

Elio Pelizzatti does not consider still life a minor genre (compared to landscapes, figures). He does not confine objects within the appearance of the image or their static nature. He gathers their forms, or the shreds of their forms, to recompose lost identities. Their bright colors—but also dull, eroded forms—pervade the entire space of interiors emptied even of silence. They overflow. There is no longer a threshold between "interior" and "exterior." They pour their chromatic vivacity (or what remains of their features) into landscapes pierced by aggressive mutations, painted by shadow or the icy hue of fluorescence. Or, as in his more recent works, they transcend the landscape to capture the glow of a nature that is always reborn.

Elio Pelizzatti has also, on occasion, addressed the theme of sacred art, capturing the pain of the "Via Crucis" as a parallel to human suffering. But above all, he has dedicated his pictorial narrative to the everyday, seeking—consciously or unconsciously—"the sacred in the everyday." Just like Alberto Giacometti.