Antonio Di Viccaro (1935) - Sperlonga

Antonio Di Viccaro’s artistic path, a coherent and sensitive landscape painter from 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 is reaffirmed along his journey, because his tactile and plastic work is made of color, a pervasive presence, whose result over time will demonstrate the acquisition and adoption of a precise color research. A passion discovered at a very young age, an innate talent that later became mastery, thanks to a career made of study, stubbornness, and work.

Today, Di Viccaro rests on a consolidated and successful knowledge of “the practice of painting”; he is born from color and arrives at it, through a natural and marked path, where the spatula, his favored tool, creates and transforms on the canvas a reality that seems known and already lived, remolded and reawakened by his touch. He will confirm the use of the spatula for a large part of his career, a technique used by only a few landscape painters in Italy, achieving the realization of a personal and recognizable style: blocks of color, placed even arbitrarily, with a remarkable visual and emotional impact. In front of his landscapes, the tremulous waters’ glazes, the alleys’ color sparks, the glints of light, the viewer is initially stunned, 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 perceives the matter; the senses are stirred.

The color dazzles; in some places the oil is so generously spread on the canvas that one might want to touch it, at times there is the sensation of hearing the crash of stormy seas tinted with a shaded blue, or of caressing the overlapping glazes in a mild lake. Then comes the detail, the care lavished on the particulars that concentrates attention. Windows bathed in strong yet reassuring light, flowers laid among bustling alleys, 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, in a process of elaboration that becomes evident at the moment of the work’s execution.

The landscape is filled with optimism, even when the canvas shows a dusk scene, because the light has already manifested itself, temporally antecedent, and preexisting. Color is a means of exerting a direct influence on the soul; it would remind the father of Abstract Art, V. Kandinsky, that Antonio Di Viccaro’s work explicitly reaches the eye, but its strength lies in the ability to go further, to move and involve the viewer’s soul.