Giacomo Montanaro

Giacomo Montanaro (Torre del Greco '70) attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples.

He began to paint and to get noticed in the Neapolitan artistic environment. Montanaro's painting shows a marked propensity for experimentation and innovation. At the beginning of his artistic career, the distinctive element of the pictorial investigation is the human figure, captured in its synthetic, fundamental and visually striking features. Since 2002 he has abandoned the canvas and traditional colors. The artist uses photographic paper as a support and acids as improper tools for painting. From a technical point of view, using an acid on photographic paper means irreversibly impressing the support, working with a considerable dose of awareness and great control: great speed is needed but without leaving anything to chance. Body and mind must march together at the same time.

“Acids are made to slide on a surface that directs them into a fluid flow, advancing along a path that gradually acquires its own precise sense. And here we find ourselves in front of landscapes that in their passing from the more decisive shades of blue to the more delicate ones of blue recall the ancient and delicate oriental techniques used in drawing and painting to describe the perspective before this was invented ... … In his acting, he appears in the contemporary guise of the painter, the photographer, the performer of a musical composition where the notes are the colors. It is he who measures the intensities, directs the slips, decides the overlaps, calculates the times that will then allow to create careful compositions. In these works the contrast between the audacity of such a radical search and the aesthetic delicacy of its result is striking because those landscapes where imaginary hills chase each other, those seas moved by non-existent waves, those horizons set to divide empty skies and fanciful plains preserve the beauty of the imaginary."