REVIEWS

Extract by the lecture of PROF. MIMMO COLETTI:

Giovannino Montanari's artworks are like open windows to the East world. Byzantine gold is the colour of the sacred…This recurring symbol, the golden domes, is really like a daydream, swinging between reality and fantasy, between the transposition of opinions and an itinerary of the mind, every painting is different from the others. The artist handles different materials, working on an endless improper artistic research, with formal inventions. I think his work is really terrific...This painting is hard to be classified, this is great painting, great painting because the shades, the colours palette chosen by the painter are like a breath of the spirit.

They are mirrors of the soul of an artist who fully understood, represented and transmitted a civilization that will never end. Byzantium, Constantinople, Venice.

I say no more; otherwise I would be too tedious, boring.

About PROF. MIMMO COLETTI

Writer, Journalist, Art critic and former Professor of art history at the academy of fine art of Perugia (Italy)

PROF. SALVATORE SANSONE says:

From Eyüp hill you can discover the town under the domes and the minarets: Constantinople. The new Rome. The second Rome. A bridge between Europe and Asia. The crystalline light draws curvy profiles, dazzling and shining. Like gold. Royal mirror. Showing the faces of the empire. In the mosaic panels of Saint Vital’s apse. In the architecture along the Adriatic Sea. On the sea. Only from the sea you can reach the borough of Giudecca. There is no land route. The sea is soft, sinuous and languid. It changes and confuses. It carries valuable objects and fabrics. It carries human beings, stories, ideas. Sometimes death.

In Montanari’s artworks there is this mixture of cultures. Melting souls. Mixtures of techniques. Shades of blue, red, yellow and green. Dense or mild colors. Pink melts gold. Creative liquefaction. Domes immersed in that deep water that retains the colors. Montanari’s canvas represents Modern golden shovels. Legitimate daughters of the Mediterranean Sea. Union of different languages and races.

Gateway of happiness.

About PROF. SALVATORE SANSONE

This review about Giovannino Montanari is of Salvatore Sansone, historian specialist of medieval art, is chief editor at the Italian Historical Institute for the Middle Ages. He achieved his PhD in Medieval Art History at the University of Salento. He is a collaborator of an important research dedicated to cataloging the manuscripts of the Vatican Library. He worked as professor of Medieval Art History at the Faculty of Foreign Languages at the University of Tuscia. He has worked as lecturer at several international conferences, with dissertations related to the iconographic aspects and iconographic artworks.

Contact him: redazone@isime.it

GUIDO FOLCO in ITALIA ARTE (June 2012, No. 6) writes:

…in the floating and iconic energy of the myth of a Sacral Byzantium, observes the man's face through the beauty and history. In the search of symbolic materials of earth and heaven, such as wood and crystal, the artist compares the eternal dualism between the material and the divine world, between corporeality and spirituality...

Giovannino Montanari is raw material, but also the gesture, the instinct, the passion: it is the essence of an innovative language, dynamic yet carefully measured in the compositional structure.

Instinct versus intellect, to the denial of the image, the rational and geometric structure that stands between being and not being, between the reality and imagination, the fantasy and the idea...

GUIDO FOLCO writes:

The international artist from Italy (International Italia Arte 2013) Giovannino Montanari with his "LUNA SUL BOSFORO" is considered one of the principal artists of present contemporary art on the international scene.

He has worked for the Last 15 years representing archetype symbologies, sacredness and spirituality in his works, through the use of acrylic and oil: He has portrayed "basilicas", Christian and Byzantine churches, views from Byzantium, Ravenna and Venice using his visionary and mystical appreciation and use of colour to infuse his works. With both "The East" and "The West".

About GUIDO FOLCO:

Editor of the Magazine ITALIA ARTE, Museum director MIIT Turin, Journalist, Art Curator

GIUSEPPINA TRAVAGLIO writes:

An unexpected meeting, obviously the art wanted a further emerging artist... Quite by accident, I became in the beautiful and historic palace of Cesi attentive on this work, very material, but light by a few bold strokes, made by a young high school student and set in a corner as a reminder of the youth.

The artist? Giovaninno Montanari, sensitive soul and humble spirit. His work and the many trips he has made during his life, enable him today to transfer these impressions in colors, beauty and emotions on canvas. These works, which he showed not public until two years ago, are an expression of beauty, architecture, love and joy of life. They enchant and dreamed of the Viewer.

About GIUSEPPINA TRAVAGLIO:

Gallery owner, curator of international exhibitions, art journalist

MARIA GIUSEPPINA MALFATTI ANGELANTONI writes in the Magazine "EOS" (January 2013 Issue No. 33):

GIOVANNINO MONTANARI Pittore

MAGNIFICENCE AND CATASTROPHE OF BYZANTIUM

From the text of the noble Nicetas the key to understand his dreamed paintings.

About MARIA GIUSEPPINA MALFATTI ANGELANTONIO:

Graduated in Art Historie, President of the Italian Committee of the Association Internationale de l'histoire du verre. She organizes exhibitions of modern and contemporary art, writes press releases, essays, and promotes cultural events

RITA MOSCATELLI (Painter and writer) writes:

The first encounter of Giovannino Montanari with the Arts world was many years ago, when as a young student, he painted small canvases which even at that time made him win the most coveted award of the school.

A complete artist who is never tired of moving forward because never satisfied with his achievements, his study is passion but it is not enough, the real objective is his own simplicity that emerges from his works, full of tenacity and stubbornness.

An obsessive search of perfection, years of hidden emotions that finally explode and fill the viewer's gaze, many shades in the cracks and countless shades given by the depth of the grooves. Giovannino is nowadays an artist who realizes what he admired as a child while playing in the studio of his mother and remained fascinated by the colours, by the chiaroscuro he could glimpse in the folds of clothes.

A colour scale that gave birth in his soul to the taste and sophistication that made him produce works so full of humanity. The sense of death and fear are removed from bright colours, from a melancholy wealth of eroticism, everything you see in his work fulfills you with delight.