20 june 2009 | VIA DI CITTà, 111 SIENA
20 june – 10 july 2009
Personal exhibition by Roberto Altmann “Ritmi del tempo”.
Roberto Altmann was born in 1961 in Sestri Levante (Genoa), where he still lives and works. He graduated from the School of Art and subsequently from the Academy of Fine Arts in Genoa, in the School of Painting. From the mid-eighties he began his exhibition activity with exhibitions in Italy, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Holland, the United States and Venezuela. Over the course of his career he has created several live performances with music and theater, as well as canvases and frescoes for churches. The result currently achieved by the Ligurian artist can be considered as the summary of an entire research path that officially began in 1982 with an “expressionist” period, and then evolved in an abstract sense around 1985.
Altmann draws his inspiration from classical or Renaissance modules to immerse his figures in contemporaneity. He only paints what “once was beautiful”, sometimes delicately, sometimes forcefully. Altmann’s painting recalls a certain expressionism with overflows into the informal, his sign is a dance of bodies, his vision of the event is aesthetic and enveloping. At first glance his canvases seem abstract, as expressionism becomes exaggerated and becomes destruction of the image, which is fragmented and dissolved. In Altmann we relive the spirit of a new “Renaissance”, where human centrality is highlighted no longer by the sumptuous presence of a body with magical anatomical measurements, but by the trouble that concerns contemporary man, creator and victim of all the contradictions, the disturbances and torments that fall upon him. In the large works, this circular and enveloping rhythm is evident, like that of a large mural fresco, intended to trigger in the observer the dismay of vertigo and a subtle sense of perdition, perhaps due to that absence of perspective against which to place the scene, which entrust a reference thought. On the occasion of the exhibition, a new series of paintings will be presented, conceived as constructions that create and fill physical and mental spaces, in which Michelangelo’s memories resurface, twisting bodies with a Renaissance flavour, scenes of battles where the figure of the horse becomes predominant; and the horse, an emblematic animal for the city of Siena, is precisely one of the central themes that characterizes the latest series of works.