For some years I had no more news of Roberto Rampinelli, Lombard artist of refined thickness, that I had the opportunity to follow for years and that I invited on several exhibitions, I was the promoter of his graphic exhibition that I presented in the catalog at the Centrale Library Sormani and wanted by the Municipality of Milan. An unusual painting,
Secred, intimate, precious, full of poetry and mysteries, because the artist has always been looked at around – as did Morandi – focusing his gaze on simple objects and things. Then made big, superlative. A story where reality escapes tout-counts realism to become magical realism, the same that was of other artists in the 1930s. In his cards and canvases, as if they were on an altar, the relics that attract the gaze, small things, the same told by the poet Guido Gozzano in that poetry that headlines “The friend of grandmother Speranza”, taken from I Interviews (1911), in which the poet, leafing through an album, finds a photo taken in 1850 that portrays the grandmother hope with the friend Carlotta. The artist has collected things and everyday objects in his paintings, all wrapped in silent poetics who knows about questioning and mysterious, small things and daily objects speak a universal language, lead to reflection and meditation. All this is captured thanks to the Banca Popolare di Lodi Foundation which presents up April 21st at the Bipielle Arte di Lodi The exhibition of the Bergamo artist Roberto Rampinelli entitled “Looks”with the patronage of the Province of Lodi and of the Municipality of Lodi. “Looks” presents itself as an anthology with Over eighty works To cover forty years of research, from 1985 to 2025, where graphics played a central role in the whole work of the artist Rampinelli, a silent character, apparently shy, always coherent, who left a masterful teaching at the school of the Castello Sforzesco. Many are work on paper, the paper has become a precious ally, with her she found a perfect partnership, on it she let creativity, drawing, magic live; In printed techniques it has become unparalleled. The represented lives in a precious, magical, silent, metaphysical aura, and all this triggers a superlative transport in the viewer and in the collector, for
way of an intertwining between light, color, shape and sign.
The engraving technique, the artist’s privileged exploration field, with his ability to retain and fix the imprint of the gesture allows him to create images that seem to emerge from an inner tension. Here the sign becomes more decisive, but always with a search for balance: each collection in the matrix is designed to build a
visual plot that speaks directly to the sensitivity of the observer.
On display we find two youth works created in the second half of the eighties that open the entire path and closes with a work of 2025, and mind you that in the three works the human figure appears, rare element, if not very rare in the works of Rampinelli: “Impronta” (1985) and “Angels” (1990) both with a mixed technique on a lithographic basis, and “man and the mountain” (2025) in a mixed technique on paper. Ancient.
A twenty -five -year path of works, with hard and painstaking work, which frame the search for Roberto Rampinelli both in the engravings and in the paintings, and certainly with looks and inspirations that refer both to Piero della Francesca to the Italian fifteenth -century painting, and then to Carlo Carrà and Giorgio Morandi.
The theme that crossed him in this itinerary was the still life With objects, fruits and flowers that tell life, the world, existence, birth and death, the passage of time. And all this starts
Certainly from that apprenticeship that Rampinelli had from the formation of the artist in Urbino with the masters Renato Bruscaglia and Carlo Ceci; Suffice to observe the series of “urns” (2020), “black bowl and vases” (2023) and “remote shells” (2016), while the “classic” series (2024), with the marble head related to the past and present in a timeless dimension. A great intensity masterpiece is that “lost wing” of 2025.
Without neglecting how next to the nature death, i landscapes They find the same incidence of Rampinelli. For him, the landscape is inner mirror, a mirror of the soul, a world that knows of paradise, of an anticipation, and wanted as it was in the romantic tradition. Painting such as poetry, and poetry as painting, everything confronts and lives, and I assure you that Rampinelli thus doing has become a cultured artist-intellectual, an unparalleled teacher; For him the Latin phrase is worth “Ut Pictura Poësis “formulated by the poet Quinto Orazio Flacco, who literally translated means “as in painting so in poetry” (Orazio, A. Pisone, 361). So as to say, therefore, “poetry is like a picture” or “a picture is like a poem”. According to Orazio there is a type of poetry that you like most if seen up close, and another that only likes if looked at from afar, or stored a second time, or analyzed with a critical eye, as happens for painting. Rampinelli through his works reveals a other world, difficult to perceive at first sight; He painter and philosopher defends his idea of the world in different forms, he painter and philosopher masks that idea in different forms.
Carlo Franza