Authors who wrote about Stefano Solimani:
Vittorio Sgarbi, Paolo Levi, Achille Bonito Oliva, Giammarco Puntelli, Gastone Ranieri Indoni, Catia Monacelli, Luciano Carini, Paolo Zauli, Francesca Mariotti, Walter Scotucci, Ireneo Lorenzoni, Alberto D’Atanasio, Stefano Papetti, Giulia Sillato, Mina Gregori, Francesco Chimienti, Alfonso Maria Capriolo, Donato Mori, Francesca Maria Ferraris, Anna Iozzino.
Vittorio Sgarbi “I giudizi di Sgarbi” Mondadori Editore 2005
Luciano Carini “Artisti in cronaca” La Cronaca Editore 2007
Vittorio Sgarbi “L’Arciere” Ghiani Editore 2010
Vittorio Sgarbi “L’ombra del Divino nell’Arte contemporanea” Cantagalli Editore 2011
Vittorio Sgarbi “Lo stato dell’Arte” Skira Editore 2011
Alberto D’Atanasio “Quando l’eroe è donna” Bevagna Editore 2011
Walter Scotucci “Eretico & Ieratico” Artelito Camerino Editore 2012
Alberto D’Atanasio “La fine del mondo tra apocalisse e apocatastasi. Gli Artisti? I nuovi profeti” Pegasusarte Editore 2012
Vittorio Sgarbi “Oltre il corpo,l’anima” Lizerarte Editore 2013
Giammarco Puntelli “Spiritualità oggi lungo le vie Francescane” La Torre Editore 2015
Giammarco Puntelli e Giulia Sillato “L’Arte e il Tempo” Mondadori Editore 2015
Giammarco Puntelli “Il labirinto dell’ipnotista” Mondadori Editore 2016
Giammarco Puntelli “L’Eternità nell’Arte” Mondadori Editore 2016
Catia Monacelli e Francesca Sacchi Tommasi “Dalla terra al Cielo” Polo Museale di Gualdo Tadino Editore 2016
Giammarco Puntelli “Profili d’Artista” Mondadori Editore 2018
Giammarco Puntelli “Genius” Mondadori Editore 2018
Giammarco Puntelli “Le scelte di Puntelli” Mondadori Editore edizioni 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019
Catalogo dell’Arte Moderna Mondadori Editore annuale
Annuario COMED Comed Editore annuale
ARTE Mondadori
ARTE-IN
FONDAZIONE SOLONIA MAGAZINE
JULIET MAGAZINE
ARTE&ARTE
EFFETTO ARTE
Stefano Solimani is a painter with an ancient spirit, not so much for his following of the traditional pictorial teachings, but for his taste which, in some cases, is explicitly citational of Italian’s seventeenth century’s iconography. This, however, does not suffice to define him, for in his paintings, in the last decade, cohabit oneiric landscapes that allude to the symbolic language of the preconscious and depictions of the human body – especially the female one – whose hyperrealism verges on crudity. When I speak of hyperrealism, I do not mean to confuse Solimani’s message with that of the American painters of the 1980s, who perceived and portrayed everyday life in a stylistic code of totalizing objectivity. This artist, on the contrary, focuses on the reality of the particular in a key that is anything but decipherable, unless one attempts to decode it through those seemingly dissonant, in some cases even informal and purely chromatic landscape pieces that act as a warp to the narrative. I am not familiar with Solimani’s previous works, but these works show a remarkable sign and chromatic maturity, which is accompanied by scenic taste, a formal sense of harmony and a strong expressive capacity. The themes treated are the result of a theoretical elaboration based on a tested knowledge of the luminous potential of both oil and acrylic. Significant and emblematic is the work Beyond the Boundary, from 2000, or from the same year, Woman with a Black Hat; not to forget Abandonment, a small painting executed in 2003, where a young woman caught in all her sensual nudity expresses in her gaze a painful astonishment. These figures cannot be characterized properly as portraits; if anything, they are volumetric constructions dense with emblematicity and questions about our inner lives. A painter of the signifier, Solimani plays on different messages using iconic symbolism as an element of rarefying the image and rebalancing the content of the construct. When an artist’s message is pregnant, multiple keys of interpretation are possible, choosing one, however, strictly belongs to the subjective sphere and sensitivity of the observer. Personally, I see in Solimani a dream teller, an evoker of obscure events, of an “unspoken” that presumably pertains to his private sphere. Indeed, each of his pictorial images brings forth a kind of tense aura, each of his paintings foreshadowing a concluded narrative that expands with the eloquence of a letter addressed to a privileged recipient. Solimani is an artist who has chosen to move within tradition, has evidently drawn from the luminous lesson of the Mannerist and Baroque schools, yet is utterly contemporary in his quick wit and geometrically allusive settings. While distinguished by technical inventions and a strong perception of corporeity, the mastery of the pictorial subject matter is not the only measure of his authenticity, for it is the poetic afflatus that holds his hand, before he trespasses on the perilous terrain of virtuosity and lends iconic sovereignty to his fervidly sensual imagination.
Vittorio Sgarbi – from “I Giudizi di Sgarbi”, Mondadori Editore, 2005
Stefano Solimani has the ancient soul of a Renaissance master with an innate taste for Beauty, synonymous with aesthetic and ethical perfection. Keeping himself out of time and contemporary history, he moves in the infinitude of creative space with a strict and controlled executive discipline, which belongs to him since his youthful years of apprenticeship. His works are meticulously pondered and then structured according to the absolute canon of verisimilitude. In this context, the preparatory pastel studies on paper testify to the precious sign texture from which his oil depictions are born and evolve, presenting themselves to the viewer as closed and concluded works.
Paolo Levi
Solimani has a meticulous and skillful technique and builds his works by studying the arrangement of masses in relation to color and light. Nothing is left to chance. His light that reveals the figures is not Caravaggesque although it is reminiscent of it; the light Solimani paints is a light filtered by his consciousness, dosed so that colors stand out in relation to the figures that remain static in the enchantment of revelation. In Solimani it is the work in its construction that generates the contemplation of the event described so that the light does not affect the work, does not become a mysterious atmosphere or a bed where holiness is revealed. More simply I would say that the subject is illuminated because it is true, real; the light is reflected by the colors and the mystery is revealed. It is the illuminated subject that allows God’s light to manifest itself, nothing else is needed. The gazes of his figures can therefore have no particular connotations, no excitement that can evoke particular motions of the soul. The figures that this great artist creates simply have the fixity of one who is on a different plane from the beholder. The artist, in this case, posits the human figure as an “epiphany “of a truth perceived and elaborated by human cognition. The image and symbols are composed in the painting so that the viewer can perceive the artist’s personal concept rather than a universal, religious hieratic message. There is no catechesis, no cathartic action, what Solimani seeks is the ancient awe that is generated in the exercise of “mimesis”: matter, nature, are subject to the passing of time and it is the artist who by his doing makes them perpetual, immortal. The artist has performed the prodigy of creation insofar as he possesses the gift of creativity and therefore has the awareness, more than any other man, that he is very close to the image of God the Creator.
Alberto D’Atanasio – from the catalog of the exhibition “In His Image” on the occasion of the 54th Festival of the Two Worlds in Spoleto, 2011
The excellence of art and painting knocks at the eternity of a conventional time. Here a young woman makes fun, in a semi-serious attitude, of the man who observes and his uncertainty, his rules. Stefano Solimani is a contemporary artist of great technical ability, one of the best figurative artists of our time, intelligent in immersing his representations in a philosophical and narrative knowledge that is sometimes enigmatic, and he is delightfully astute in posing those questions that shake consciences and thoughts to arrive at convincing and comprehensive pictorial solutions. His themes are well known, both those of a religious nature, experienced with secular representation, and those involving history and the female figure. An educated man who is careful to sow clues and symbols, he is endowed with gifts and disciplines that allow him to elaborate, in the artistic space, a patient and excellent painting in the service of a narrative that often transforms from philosophical to narrative, and vice versa. He captures, with a syntax attentive to every detail, the historical moment, rendering it, with a pictorial and artistic process that is out of the norm, contemporary and vibrant, conceptual and technically surprising. In him we do not find shadows and rhetoric of quotation or decoration, but the essential development of a thought that meets the interlocutor in dialogue and meditation.
Giammarco Puntelli – from “Puntelli’s Choices,” Mondadori Editore, 2015
“I feel that time falls and makes noise in my soul…” writes Cardarelli in one of his poems, and Solimani on a line of natural continuity seems to add “leaving footprints of love and pain…” Through twenty works, this artist demonstrates how the female figure in its full maturity and beauty is the protagonist of his creative world with all its charge of eros, understood as the original instinct of life and love. Although the figures are rendered through a hyperrealism based on an excellent executive skill in the depiction of every detail of the bodies, they know how to introduce us into that mysterious realm of primary forms, of archetypes related to the origins of life. Each painting appears as an incomplete page of an ancient code, or piece of a decomposed puzzle where the various planes of the tale develop through nocturnal colors the innermost meaning of the works, letting us glimpse various possible interpretations. Each figure of a woman takes on a primordial value of welcome and fertility but is never untethered from the aesthetic search for “divine proportions” in a care of figurative language and style that is not based only on external and formal characters, but on a central idea that enlivens them all: life understood as an indispensable medium of love and pain.
Anna Iozzino
By now, as I said, the figure dominates every one of his paintings unchallenged, and it is a representation of extraordinary realism, where skill is combined with interpretation, where the detail becomes symbol and metaphor, where the whole constitutes a reason for reflection and stunned amazement. Truth truer than truth, and not only because it is constructed with great rigor and knowledge, but because it is filtered by emotions, projected beyond the physicality of bodies and situations. A hyperrealism capable of capturing the viewer and astonishing him for the perfection of the execution, for the sensuality of the representations and the beauty of the embodiments, but also capable of moving the heart and the mind, of questioning the spirit and being, therefore, topical and contemporary. But Stefano Solimani was also current and contemporary some time ago when his expression was concentrated in the description of desolate and bleak metropolitan suburbs caught in the deep and distressing nocturnal silences, when, with lucidity and realism, he showed the great solitudes of our days through pale and blurred lights that illuminated opulent and shapely streetwalkers. And even today, years later, his urge to investigate and peer into the phenomena of everyday reality has by no means been exhausted; on the contrary, it has become stronger and more engaging, more refined and subtle, and his brush works like the wide-angle lens of a good photographer taking close-up shots, with breathtaking close-ups, of beautiful women’s bodies, sensual and attractive nudes, gently camouflaged and hidden erotism that ignites desires and passions. The nude now serves him as a mirror to attract looks and attentions, but also and above all to denounce conditions and situations: widespread voyeurism, the superficial and light use of beauty, easy compromises and the desire to transgress so fashionable and widespread today. Extraordinary and perhaps unique among so many that can be observed is his Hyperrealism, which succeeds in capturing shadows and nuances, lights and vibrations, distances and volumes, masterfully creating photographic deception, the physical need to touch the work to discover its makeup, the astonished amazement at such perfection. A perfection that envelops every tiny anatomical detail, every garment and then subsides in the gaze where the eyes bring in sparks of life, communicate emotions and moods. Big eyes, expressive eyes to tell anxieties and loneliness, victories and defeats, joys and disappointments. An Intense expression addressed to the great human problems, because it goes beyond the boundaries of beauty and aesthetic perfection and becomes a voice of secret intimacy, an objective reflection of our tormented days.
Luciano Carini from “Artists in the Chronicle” – La Cronaca Editore 2007
Looking at Maestro Stefano Solimani’s painting, I am reminded of the sentence that Stefano Zecchi, the famous art historian, wrote in one of his books, entitled “Understanding Art,” which is, verbatim: “The most important word in the art world is beauty.” Then, of course Zecchi gives various interpretations of beauty, but that is another matter. What I want to express, however, is how much Stefano Solimani’s art adheres perfectly to Zecchi’s sentence, since in the images Solimani depicts, that is, in the perfect bodies, in the expressive gazes, in the harmonious limbs, there is the rediscovery of a beauty that harks back to the models of the seventeenth-century painters, in a word, to absolute beauty. It is not for nothing, in fact, that the Master founded in 2007, an artistic movement to which he gives the name “Hyperaesthetics,” thus proclaiming himself the father of a way of making art all aimed at taking possession of aesthetic harmony and beauty, as one of the most important means of saving the world from the horror toward which, in many ways, it seems to be heading. He thus comes to reaffirm the priority of aesthetics in art, implementing it by depicting the corporeality of human figures, mostly women, who have always been the repositories par excellence of the concept of beauty. These are women whose femininity the Painter focuses on through the figural intensity of anatomical perfection, representing them in the paintings in a variety of forms of beauty, always classical. Forms of beauty that Solimani charges with a great charm made, yes, of sensuality, but also, and for much of it, of an evocative inner light that illuminates and transfigures them. Thus transfigured, they appear immersed in a surreal dimension where they acquire an additional charm that makes them rise to authentic as well as unusual symbols of exuberant carnality and at the same time of mystical spirituality. It is in this dimension, which I would call “symbolic surrealism,” that the image not only reveals an intense aesthetic harmony, but also highlights something deeper, higher, and more mysterious. Depicted in ecstatic expressions and attitudes, these powerfully sensual creatures, yet as if enraptured by a mystical ecstasy, are propelled toward a hieratic contemplative spirituality, dare I call it sacred. And perhaps such a definition is not entirely incorrect, for in this vibrant, perceptible sign of sacredness, is already contained the embryo ready to germinate in the works that the Master will present in a forthcoming exhibition show of his, concerning precisely the sacred, in Venice. But, returning to our Exhibition, these figures of women, affirm their presence with detachment, and at the same time, they ask for nothing more than to be observed, because what is beautiful gives joy, and, aware that they arouse joy in those who look at them, they seem to want to offer it as a tribute in honor of beauty itself. That’s why the images that Solimani creates, while realistic to the highest degree, so much so as to be called hyper-realistic, also belong to a dreamlike reality, in that they are expressed in a dreamy, suspended, inexplicable, abstract dimension, so that each of these works, although figurative, can also be considered “a classic abstract painting.” For abstraction is not only that made up of vertical, horizontal, curved lines, or in any case an unrecognizable drawing: abstractionism is also that which, starting from the physical, at a certain point, unties itself from the physical, creating a new reality that has no connection with the physical. Solimani thus focuses on a conceptual thought of this abstract and therefore indecipherable reality, and arrives at a kind of decomposition of space and therefore of the thought that animates it, through the polished perfection of color, the impact of volumetric forms, the perception of an absolute harmony, which for this reason becomes emblematic. He then leaves to the viewer the recomposition of this same space, since he certainly does not intend to offer the viewer the object of a prefigured reality , but to allow the viewer to prefigure this reality, according to his own tastes, his own ability to perceive the characters, his own sensibility. Therefore, the Master makes use of both oneiric symbolism and abstractionism to make the image rarefied and enigmatic, in order to give it many interpretative keys, because like any great painter, Stefano Solimani is also a narrator of dreams and events, but in the interpretation of these, one must moreover always keep in mind that, in his painting, what matters most is the unspoken, or rather the non-visible. It is that kind of openness that he never leaves out in his narrative, so that the viewer can become part of it, and here expand the limits of his own visionariness, to such a point that the work of art observed, can also become a little bit his own. Although Solimani’s pictorial gesture moves in the tradition of Classicism, draws on the Renaissance, makes use of Surrealism and Symbolism, the flair and energy with which he works are very current, cast in today’s reality and therefore fast, allusive and ambiguous, magically engaging and extremely captivating. Moreover, and I must add this because this is in my chords, his pictorial gesture is guided by a deep poetic afflatus that is grasped with emotion and joy, but does not entangle the images too much; on the contrary, it helps to liberate them, adding to each, if possible, an even greater solemnity of grace, harmony, in a word, beauty. And here I go back to the same sentence of the art historian Stefano Zecchi, a sentence already quoted at the beginning of my speech and which I like to reiterate, namely that “the most important word in the world of art is beauty.” Because, as I hope you were able to grasp from my words and as much better you can understand by looking at his works, the art of Maestro Solimani, is perfectly inscribed and described in this sentence.
Francesca Maria Ferraris
Maestro Stefano Solimani’s masterful pictorial-descriptive propensity no longer surprises us; if anything, we can acknowledge that it amazes us every time he comes up with engaging themes such as today’s “Pauline Imperial Venus.” The absolute propriety of language with which he explicates his art, speaks to us of very personal registers, anecdotal or historical motifs understood and imbued with perceptible humanitarian addendums that, as they are told, rise to delicate hints of lyricism. Inherent and evident in the Maestro is the ability to conglobate multiple references where we can appreciate the clarity so dear to Hayez, Ciseri’s cue of ideal beauty, and in his seated or reclining models, musicians or divas tout court, there are multiple honorary citations addressed to Titian, Raphael and Canova.
Gastone Ranieri Indoni