Antonio Brizzolari
A Quasi-Self-Portrait

edited by Elena Bottinelli

Antonio Brizzolari is a singular artist who worked in the shadows for decades, but he has never interrupted an artistic practice that identifies his very life. A promising student at the Art Institute of Porta Romana, a young talent on the Florentine art scene of the Sixties, and then a teacher of drawing and art history at various schools in the city, he had to be admitted to a special facility when the mental illness that had long troubled him became worse. Only now, thanks to the determination of his brother Giuseppe and the curator Elena Bottinelli, has it been possible to reassemble a large part of the artist’s oeuvre – around 150 works – spanning his troubled career. They evoke the chromatic vortexes of Van Gogh, and the haunted expressionistic vision and sensitivity to colour of CO.BR.A. and the Transavanguardia movement, yet he maintains a precise identity that can be found in the recurrence of certain themes (spaceships, murder, screaming), the tactile quality  of the pictorial surface and the variety of supports he used.

Now over seventy years old, he is at the height of his creative fervour and the desire to communicate his passion, of which we get a vivid and poetic picture thanks to the emotional tribute of Antonio Natali and the narration of Elena Bottinelli, who depicts the artist in his eternal condition as an outsider.