Antonio Di Viccaro (1935) - Sperlonga

The artistic path of Antonio Di Viccaro, a consistent and sensitive landscape painter, born in Castelforte, Latina, is marked by a key, strong, and incisive element: color, the absolute protagonist of his entire creation. He defines himself as a painter, and this remains true throughout his journey, because his material and plastic work is made precisely of color, an overwhelming presence, whose result over time will demonstrate the acquisition and adoption of a precise coloristic research. A passion discovered at a very young age, an innate talent that later became mastery, thanks to a career built on study, stubbornness, and work.

Today, Di Viccaro is strengthened by a consolidated and winning knowledge of “making painting.” He emerges from color and arrives at it through a natural, marked path, in which the spatula, his favorite tool, creates and transforms on the canvas a reality that seems familiar and lived, remolded and awakened by his touch. He will confirm the use of the spatula for much of his career, a technique used by few landscape painters in Italy, achieving the realization of a personal and recognizable style: tiles of color, juxtaposed even arbitrarily, with notable visual and emotional impact. Before his views, the tremulous waters and the alleys’ color flashes, the viewer is initially dazed, almost slapped; the eye examines the landscape, felt and interpreted by the artist, in a new, modern key, where yellow is paired with blue, red with pink, in a contrast that creates unity. One becomes aware of the matter; the senses are moved.

The color dazzles; in some places the oil is so generously smeared on the canvas that one almost wants to touch it; at times there is a sense of hearing the crash of the waves of a stormy sea tinted with a soft blue, or of caressing the overlaid veils in a gentle lake. Then comes the detail, the care lavished on the particulars that captures attention. Windows bathed in a strong but reassuring light, flowers resting among the bustling lanes, where human figures are rarely depicted, with nature, life, and the love of beauty as protagonists. Di Viccaro feels nature; he has made the landscape his own, which takes light through an interiorization of his own, in a process of reworking that becomes evident at the moment of carrying out the work.

The landscape is infused with optimism, even when the canvas shows a scene at dusk, because the light has already manifested itself, temporally preceding and preexisting. Color is a means of exerting a direct influence on the soul; it suggests to us the father of Abstract Art, V. Kandinsky, that Antonio Di Viccaro’s work explicitly reaches the eyes, but its strength lies in being able to go further, to move and involve the spectator’s soul.