Mixed media on round canvas

‘Mec-Art’ period ( 1963 – 85 ) ; From the ‘Abbaco’ series

Signed and dated 1979 lower middle of the composition

Dimensions :  

Diameter: 19 ^1/4 in.   Diameter with frame: 26 ^3/4 in.

Exhibition :

Tour du monde en tondo, Issoudun, Musée de l’Hospice Saint-Roch, 30 June-30 December 2017

 

Biography :

Gianni Bertini, an Italian artist residing in France from 1951, appears as a key yet unclassifiable figure of the French artistic scene. The work he leaves behind is unique and fundamentally innovative. Truculent and creative, he’s never ceased to question his own pictorial language, thus often remaining ahead of the movements he took part in without actually joining them, like the ‘Nouveaux Réalistes’ or the ‘Figuration Narrative’. Even though the art critic Pierre Restany, theorist and founder of the ‘Nouveaux Réalistes’, always praised Gianni Bertini.

In 1963, he imagines a new creative process he calls ‘Mec-Art’ (mechanical art), which lasts until 1985. It is characterised by the use of photographic transfer on emulsified canvas. Taking the opposing view of abstraction, which is all the rage during the 50’s, Bertini favours figuration. The modernity of his approach lies in his appropriation of a whole everyday life imagery. ‘Amore Mio’ belongs to the series entitled ‘Abbaco’, initiated in 1976. His work is based on the questioning on the position of man in today’s society. To that end, the artist reappropriates universal images and transposes them into contemporary myths, the gap thus created provoking surprise for the spectator. Here, the painter reuses several elements that place his painting within the great Italian painting tradition from the Quattro and Cinquecento, like the choice of the tondo layout, the universal Madonna and child’s iconography or the scenery in the background. These sources allow him to play with the dichotomy between ancient and contemporary. Renaissance for the imagery and contemporaneity in the shapes that ‘dress’ the mother and child, as a reference to the world of machinery. Real leitmotiv, these forms were branded as ‘Bertinisations’ by the critic Pierre Restany who invented the term. Furthermore, Bertini here illustrates a theme that is very important to him, that of woman, sometimes contemporary, sometimes as Madonna but always modern and object of fascination.

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