Light and colour, Angelo Morbelli

Bottegantica Gallery, Milan

Angelo Morbelli's paintings may be of various people and based on a wide variety of themes, but to the attentive observer, all of his works seem to depict one and only one subject: the heart of the artist.

One senses that in all of the efforts of this painter from Alessandria, through his research, uncertainties and errors, his greatest aspiration was to have his canvases render what was most straightforward and immediate, the voice of his heart. A painting by Morbelli does not narrate, does not describe: it is the outpouring of an inner life, which overcomes the usual dryness or the heartbreak of a tragedy and abandons itself to a single feeling.

Hence the well-known restraint of details, the singular simplicity of his vocabulary: the compositional scheme in his canvases does not suggest anything other than his inner turmoil. It does not distract the observer with a complex image that could be misinterpreted as more than what is meant; indeed, the more vague and indeterminate it is, the more the artist likes it, because it reveals his intimate life.

Morbelli's artistic itinerary proceeds toward the combination of a vision of life and a conception of art that are defined from the very first works. They become more precise as they go along, but without turning or overturning, they acquire resonance and depth through an analysis - that does not deny its starting point - that is slow, discreet, and alien to all exteriority. This gradual, personal evolution is in perfect agreement with the shy reserve of his nature. The first characteristic that is evident to those who observe Morbelli's paintings is the precision, the meticulous attention that he puts into describing reality: people, objects and environments are represented with modules of extreme naturalism.