Biography
Born in 1952 in Pistoia, where he lives and works, spacing out long periods with the Island of Elba.
He began to paint with already 14 years oil with a fervor that will continue undaunted to fifteen years, until the obligations and professional responsibilities diverted his energy and attention, even taking it out of Pistoia for several years.
At the turn of the 80s and 90s he moved to Milan. In this period it makes its way into his artistic career the overwhelming need to free itself from the representation of the real, to try to create new emotions on the canvas or on wood using new forms of expression that go beyond the mere representation.
The few works of that period may, at first, lack a consistent and productive consistency that makes them seem almost unrelated to each other. The long lapse of time between the creation of a work and the other (sometimes more than one year) appears to make them distinct and separate units, but at a closer examination shows that the common feature is a constructive tension throughout intellectual who shuns the gesture, made more prominently in the works marked by the drawing of geometric shapes in appearance, but that is also found in the most "immediate cadres."
From these "fragments", these "bricks" of his painting Velio resumes, from 2015, the thread interrupted but never broken of his artistic career.
The works of fervent new production are all linked by a strong and passionate color, made even more vivid by the shine of lines and strokes blacks or dark. These "dark notes" put even more emphasis on the color because they often come together in a plastic thickness created by plaster, stucco and sand.
CRITICAL CONTRIBUTIONS
A Tale by Alessandro Mannelli
Time passing
"Maybe it is true that each man carries loyalty to a certain voice inherent in his very blood, and that he cannot but obey that voice, however many defections occasion may incite him to."
Gesualdo Bufalino “The Keeper of Ruins ”
(translated by Patrick Creagh)
There comes a time when the emotion of old thoughts becomes overwhelming. There comes a time when the calmed depths mature and the soul’s tears break free and hover in the air.
There comes a time when our senses are able to distinguish the subtlest fragrances, the smoothest – or roughest – surfaces, the most refined tastes, the sweetest – or harshest – melodies.
There comes a time when the innermost self can be reached without fear and is regarded with respect and love but also with crystal-clear awareness.
Or perhaps as much self-knowledge as awareness. Or the opposite. Out of this opposition comes a multifaceted sense of shame that leads one to deny, at times, one’s own nature, but also to assess oneself objectively, as if standing before a full-scale mirror, you could see someone who only resembles you, but is not really you – that person you thought you knew.
Life teaches us to compete with ourselves. Yet what lingers in the end is the peace made with one's own experiences, one’s own story.
A vocation
Art, every artistic expression is an obvious and inescapable sign of this progression and its outcome. Velio has lived life and his experience bears clear and inescapable traces of how much each of us “carries written in our own blood".
The first outcomes of his intellectual journey, of his expression as a man and an artist belong to a distant past, yet they are powerfully and clearly connected to his latest works, in which there clearly appears a reduction to the essential, a real-life poetry, transferred to the rough and imperfect surfaces, that the artist has wished to exalt in his latest works.
Velio is reborn as a phoenix each time that he, as a man, transfers to canvas perceived tensions, and attempted or imagined paths. This necessary passage belongs to all those who live and coexist with the flame of art, often subdued or disguised by other, very different activities.
Velio is reborn, and his new life is traversed by the thrills that lead him into uncharted lands.
Velio is reborn and his artistic-self explores roads that belong to a somewhat different past. Yet in the reconstructed pieces, in the nettings that capture memories, in those rough, skillfully blended surfaces with deep red, brown, and gold backgrounds, experiences related to structures of operating behavior, to man-resource management, social skills and desires that belong to man are re-interpreted, creating a conscious metaphor of the artist who survives, resists, and finally emerges triumphant.
However, let us go slowly.
Artistic Vision
At first it was a triumph of color, especially yellows and reds, with backgrounds defined by a spider’s web of "paths", as if to identify a hypothetical mental map (perhaps of life’s journey?).
A symphony of notes with senses alert to the fragrances and flavors of a new life and new directions.
As in a life re-lived, each painting has pushed the exploration of color further and brought thoughts closer together, until they formed clusters, the reds acquired shape, materiality, and density, and the yellows become suns, pure gashes of gold.
Look for a tear in the net
that binds us, burst out, break free! ... "
E. Montale , On the Threshold , from “Cuttlefish Bones”
Awareness and the interpretation of pain is overpowering; the tear in the wire netting appears uncontrollable and liberating and the sun, a hint of salvific light, a moment of new-found joy, a triumphant joie de vivre.
The wire netting – sometimes a fine or a coarse mesh, sometimes a squared micromesh – pasted and blended into the background material is suddenly opened. Does the tear mean there is a way out of suffering?
We should not ask he who experienced it and offers it.
Velio does not answer. His tranquil silence lets each individual interpret that doubt.
It is true. Each person can read their own story in these deep red pieces, in those paintings where gold or brown form the background and open elsewhere into a vertical or horizontal slit where brown, black, and gold itself separate the “world” into two universes. These two universes seem to reflect each other as in some of the more recent works where the almost whites give the impression of a new horizon. Perhaps it is a new frontier for the artist, a new approach, a different awareness, a road for those who have passed through the mesh of this “wire netting” and travel freely on the sea of a new world.
Alessandro Mannelli, October 2016
from the critical prepared by GIULIO MALAOSTIA for solo exhibition Arte in San Biagino, Pistoia april 2016
This is how, following in the footsteps of Orpheus, our journey proceeds into Velio Ferretti’s art: painting that is color, material, form, and the absence of form, simultaneously. Above all, it is music, exposed and trapped on a static support.
Velio brings music to mind, most particularly jazz, with its seemingly random and out-of-tempo drum bursts, which are actually intentional and balanced to contrast, in an extremely calculated way, the notes of the guitar, with which they are almost fighting to create noise before coming smoothly together in a new rhythm, carried on a velvety carpet of harsh bass notes.
This balance between black and notes of color is like a score waiting to be played (by the viewer, by us!). It is a static situation waiting to be revived by the breath of life animating the clay Golem who protects the secret that only Velio seems to know and which he shows us in all its simple clarity.
The intensity and strength of the colors accentuate the stressed notes, downbeat and upbeat, while the brush strokes are interpretations of the song being silently and intrusively played directly to our brain.
The lines and shapes that, at first seemed disconnected and randomly scattered, unite before our eyes like a Mayan code, positioning themselves to begin dancing.
The artist’s every gesture is inspired by a passionate inner impulse, conveyed however by the technique that brings everything back to reason, in a perfect and elegant counterpoint.
All things considered, that is what seems to me the great strength of Velio Ferretti, the skilled conductor of an orchestra of light and shadow, united and guided by the force of Pictorial Gesture.
