Giovanni Parlato (1957) - Contadina con capra

Beautiful oil painting on canvas signed Giovanni Parlato (Vico Equense, 1957) depicting a young peasant girl in traditional Campanian dress as she feeds a brown goat with a bell around its neck. The female figure, wearing a gray skirt, cobalt blue apron gathered at the waist, dark bodice and white shirt, wears a red floral headscarf tied around her head — the dominant chromatic element that immediately captures the eye. The pose is natural and casual, with the left arm holding up the skirt and the right arm extended toward the goat, in a gesture of affectionate rural everyday life.
The background is treated with loose, vibrant brushwork, typical of the post-impressionist tradition, with touches of green, ochre and earth that evoke an indeterminate pastoral landscape. The light is soft and warm, enveloping the figures with gentleness without obvious direct sources. The color palette is rich and contrasted: the bright blue of the apron dialogues with the reds of the headscarf and the brown tones of the goat, creating a lively yet balanced harmony.
The goat — rendered with anatomical precision and painterly sensitivity — occupies the left half of the composition, its head turned toward the human figure in a mood of confident trust. The detail of the orange collar and the bell shows careful descriptive rendering of the animal.

Work in its original golden and green frame, offered as a courtesy; therefore any complaint about potential imperfections will not be accepted.

Born in Vico Equense on February 22, 1957, in the heart of the Sorrento Peninsula, Giovanni Parlato trained artistically at the Istituto d'Arte of Sorrento, then refined his craft at the Academy of Fine Arts of Naples, where he honed that technical mastery of color and light that would become the hallmark of his entire body of work. His painting consciously moves away from artistic vanguards linked to Abstract art, embracing with resolve the great Italian figurative tradition. It is a clear field choice, not backward-looking, but a fidelity to a language that centers on man, landscape and daily life — rendered through loose, vibrant brushwork, woven with southern light.
In 1978, still very young, he made his debut at the International Art Gallery in Vico Equense, obtaining a ten-year contract that allowed him to reveal his painting in his homeland. It is the beginning of a career that, within a few years, would cross the boundaries of Campania.
The international turning point comes in 1996, when the artist travels to Beirut to paint the portrait of the Maronite Patriarch and the Lebanese Ambassador to Rome — an assignment that attests to the stature of his portraiture and projects him into a context of high-level institutional commissions. In the same year he exhibits at Arte e Arte Gallery of Torre Annunziata, La Scintilla of Vico Equense and the Centro d'Arte Engema of Pagani (Salerno).
From 1997 to 1999 he participates in Expo Arte in Bari. In 1998 he moves to Cadaqués (Barcelona), where he holds a solo show at the Sales d'exposicions Casinò. In 2000 he is among the protagonists of the Mostra Mercato d'Arte in Padua. In 2001 he returns to Cadaqués, meeting great success among collectors, so much so that it is repeated in 2005 with a solo show at Galeria de Arte Frvela in Madrid.
In 2007 he becomes the protagonist of a solo exhibition at the cultural center Graziart in Bitonto, where the mayor Nicola Pice writes of him: “Giovanni Parlato's painting reveals a tendency to represent reality, before the observer's eyes, as a 'spectacular' form, i.e. as a form of art to be perceived through the eyes, without symbolist tendencies: the painting thus fills with light and color for the sharp sense of the visible.”
Parlato's artistic vein materializes in seascapes and landscapes, sunlit countryside and figures of everyday life — a painterly universe in which rural Campania, its colors and its simple humanity rise to universal subject matter, treated with the chromatic sensitivity of someone who knows the great Neapolitan tradition of the nineteenth century and reworks it with a personal and contemporary language.

His works are present in private collections in Italy, Spain and Lebanon, and are regularly handled by major Italian auction houses.