EROS RENZETTI

Biography curated by Ines Millesimi

1965

Eros – Giancarlo, the name with which he was christened, is now just a memory stored in the births registry- Renzetti was born in Rome on the 8th of February. It might seem a quirk at first but Eros is the name his family has affectionately called him from the very beginning, given his startling resemblance to his brother, who was stillborn three years previously, and whose name was Eros.

Like Dalí, who always felt the inward presence of his brother, who also died three years before Dalí was born and who had looked a great deal like him, Eros too grew up with this arcane sentiment of the double. He soon began to dedicate himself to drawing and experimenting with various techniques since, from an early age, he had a notion that once he was an adult he would be an artist. A vivid memory that Eros would cherish from childhood was seeing the film Ziegfeld Follies starring Fred Astaire and being impressed by the sets and by the costumes worn for those perfectly synchronized and perfect dances.

1979-1985

From 1975 on he attended Istituto Statale d’Arte Roma I (ISA) in via Silvio d’Amico 111, leaving school with an Art teaching diploma in 1982. There he studied sculpture under the guidance of Carlo Lorenzetti as well as painting under Paolo Cotani. Both of these artists were well-known in the art world and not just in Italy or in Rome. These were the years when Lorenzetti was seeking a stark and spiritual lyricism in rigorously abstract form. The sign hovering in space is made up of the modulation of the reflecting sheet of metal, able to transmit a formal idea of freedom and lightness that is anti-monumental. Cotani, interested in the language of photography after rubbing shoulders with well-known American photographer, was the protagonist of an Analytical or New Painting, which came in the wake of the experimentations of Arte Povera. His art in those years achieved the essence of minimalism while never straying from the traditional repertoire of painting.

In 1984 Eros Renzetti was awarded his leaving school diploma in Applied Art at the Istituto d’Arte, graduating in Metal and Jewellery Art under Eliseo Mattiacci, another well-known international artist who, in the Eighties, explored the theme of astronomic space with works and installations that succeeded in transmitting a strong cosmic energy. Under Mattiacci, who was then a professor of enamels, he produced various masks made of enamelled copper. Eros picked up the art of designing jewellery with the greatest of ease, and he was able to develop this talent with the great professional who had worked with Cagli, Mirko, Afro and Cannilla in Rome in the Fifties for Mario Masenza the jeweller. From these brief notes, which sum up the schooling of the young Eros, a clear picture emerges of, firstly, what stimulating settings the classrooms of the Istituto d’Arte were then, and, secondly, what changes have taken place in the thirty years since he left to gradually limit the “practical” approach in the workshops of these schools which, in the wake of the educational reform, became Art lyceums. Thus, in a context where the broadest range of technical skills were taught, Eros designed jewellery and modelled small sculptures of mostly invented figures portrayed in hieratic poses. Meanwhile, he kept company with Italo Mussa, art critic and theoretician of the so-called Pittura Colta, consolidating an increasingly genuine interest in the art of figuration and discarding- despite maintaining a respect for and a consciousness of this type of expression- a form approaching abstract experimentation, installations and the most extreme contemporary trends which, all the same, had influenced his earliest training. He became increasingly attracted to the creative world of the theatre, of set-building, costumes and atmospheres that are spectacular in the way they unfold “in the here and now”. He saw the show Flowers, pantomima per Jean Genet starring Lindsay Kemp at the Teatro Brancaccio in Rome, and was totally mesmerised. He would have further opportunities to meet the great British mime artist, with whom he would exchange various drawings. In the meantime, in 1979, when Eros was just fourteen years old, some of his drawings were spotted by the visionary artist Fabrizio Clerici, a leading artist in Rome, in Italy, and abroad, whose expression was cultured and extremely sophisticated, hovering between metaphysical suspension and surrealism.

Encouraging Eros to pursue this path and to increasingly hone his techniques, Clerici invited him to visit his studios in Rome and in Barottoli, in the municipality of Monteroni d’Arbia. Siena. Here, in Barottoli, in the church hall adjoining the house, there is a contemporary copy of Rutilio Manetti’s seventeenth century painting Tentazione di Sant’Antonio, and it was precisely in this magical place that Leonardo Sciascia, on a visit to his friend Clerici, found the inspiration and idea for his book Todo Modo. Eros underwent a prolonged and pivotal apprenticeship at Fabrizio Clerici’s studio, becoming his assistant and sharing his home until he died in 1993.

From that moment on he took charge of preserving the memory of the artist and running his large historical archive. Thus Eros Renzetti had the opportunity to work alongside a highly independent artist who was difficult to pigeonhole in any group or category.

As Clerici was not just an artist but also a highly sophisticated intellectual, who was friendly with and held in esteem by eminent figures in the world of art, literature and international cinema, Renzetti was invited along on the numerous trips Clerici made in the Eighties to Egypt, Paris, and New York. Eros met a number of very different people at that time: Leonor Fini, Salvador Dalí, Federico Fellini, Dalida, Brigitte Bardot, Serge Gainsbourg, Rock Hudson, María Félix, François Mitterrand, Boris Kochno, Silvana Mangano, Alida Valli, Georges Perec, Ingrid Bergman, Isabella Far de Chirico, Vittorio Gassman, Laura Betti, Leonardo Sciascia, Hebert von Karajan, Giulietta Simionato…each of whom succeeded in leaving a deep impression on him, contributing to the development of his character, which was anxiously inquisitive, sensitive and very kind but also capable of asperity and aloofness.

In the meantime Renzetti made masks and costumes for various plays. It was in Paris and in Saint Dyé-sur-Loire that he fi rst met Leonor Fini, with whom he struck up a close friendship. They would continue to meet until her death in 1996, with and without the company of Fabrizio Clerici, who had been a friend of the painter since 1943. For Eros Leonor would become an enlightened muse, free

and unshackled to any historical period, inspirer of new dreams (they would spend entire evenings discussing Füssli and Pontormo).

This meeting was not just intellectual magnetism or a random union of souls belonging to very different generations. Both shared the same artistic approach and working method (they exchanged drawings, postcards and photographs, which documented meetings, stories or events containing alchemical and theatrical elements).

Both had the same slow and controlled working method.

The brush-stroke had to be imperceptible, almost as though the image painted were a magical and spiritual apparition. Eros did a small oil portrait of Leonor in 1983 and others at different times, as a token of his admiration, while Eddy Brofferio, a mutual friend of Clerici and Leonor Fini, and a brilliant photographer who worked in both America and Europe, took various portraits of him, which now belong to the prestigious Alinari collection in Florence, seeing him

almost as the reincarnation of a Caravaggio model.

1986-1991

Beginning in 1986 Eros took courses in set design taught by Fabio Vergoz as well as stagecraft taught by Giorgio Scalco at the Fine Arts Academy in Rome, graduating in 1990. Vergoz established the chairs of set design at the Fine Arts Academy in via Ripetta in Rome and at the Academy of Viterbo, and taught many Italian Oscar-winning set designers. His detailed stories of the sumptuous production he took part in at Cinecittà in 1959 on the set of Ben Hur were the stuff of legend with his students. Renzetti’s interest as a young set and costume designer was focussed mainly on ballet and dance theatre. He also met Kazuo Ohno, an important Butoh dancer. Due to its anti-narrative and the slow movement of the bodies which create, as in tableaux vivants, a suspension of time, this type of dance attracted him immensely, to the point that it influenced some of the drawings he produced at this time.

The subjects of his graphic work were, above all, imaginary halflength portraits of disturbing and devilish cardinals, traced with pencil or a silver nib. He also designed and produced an important set-sculpture for H.M. De Montherlant’s show Pasifae, staged at the Teatro Romano in Nora.

1992-1994

After seeing the anatomical waxes preserved in the museum of Le Specola in Florence, he painted a series of tablets which he would call Teste anatomiche, where the knot of veins and capillaries constitutes the structure of even more deeply disturbing faces. One of these tablets would be particularly admired by Leonor Fini, who would encourage Eros to further explore this visionary coté that investigates beneath the skin of things.

In Rome with Fabrizio Clerici he visited the Sistine Chapel and climbed up onto the scaffolding that had been erected for the restoration of the Last Judgement. In 1994 the National Academy of San Luca purchased il Ritratto di Fabrizio Clerici, painted by Eros in the summer of 1992 at the artist’s studio in Barottoli in the countryside near Siena, for its picture gallery.

1995-1999

He held his fi rst solo exhibition at the Cà d’Oro gallery in Rome, where he exhibited twenty works, including eight paintings and twelve works on paper. A dedication from Leonor Fini, written for the occasion, was published in the catalogue: “Dear Giancarlo, when I look for a long time at your lovely drawing of the face, which perhaps is bizarrely masked, and also that soft light that veils the two creatures that burn with desire for one another, one sees from your artistic touch the contradiction that engulfs everything and instils fear”. In 1996 The Best magazine dedicated an article to him written by Charles Reynaud des Sablon. He exhibited a large painting with the title Visioni sonore at the Studio S-Arte Contemporanea gallery in Rome on the occasion of the exhibition Corpo a corpo. Tre maniere di guardare al corpo. He took part in the Sixth International Biennial in Cairo with Password, an oil painting of vast proportions. A monographic issue of Psicoanalisi Contro magazine came out illustrated with his drawings and paintings. In 1998 he was invited by Alitalia to show his work in various group exhibitions. He designed the graphics for a pull-out that came with the magazine Freccia Alata News (no. 4, 1998). In the following year he held a solo exhibition at the J.F. Kennedy Airport in New York and produced a silk screen painting on silver sheeting for the Pegaso prize.

2000-2007

The protagonists of the series of paintings with which he inaugurated the new century were bodies and faces which emerged within iridescent spaces generating mysterious nonsenses with a forceful visionary impact. He also produced Testa alata and Pegaso, two numbered silkscreen paintings. In 2002 he produced a painting on Cleopatra shown in the group exhibition Cleopatra at the Egypt Academy in Rome and, subsequently, in a travelling exhibition in Egypt and the Republic of Azerbaijan. In April 2003 he inaugurated the exhibition Cleopatra. Michelangelo all’Arte Contemporanea at the Alexandria Center of Art in Alexandria in Egypt; the same exhibition was subsequently moved to the Akhnatoon Center of Arts-Zamalek. In July he produced two paintings for the Giffoni Film Festival shown in the group exhibition Un mondo d’immagini per chi immagina il mondo. In 2004 he took part in the contemporary art exhibition Salone di Maggio. La natura e l’uomo in Rome at the Monument to Vittorio Emanuele II. He also showed Opium, a specially painted tempera, in the exhibition Uroburo o dell’Eterno Ritorno (omaggio a Cocteau) held at the Archivio di Stato di Parma in 2005. In December he exhibited in New York at J.F. Kennedy Airport and saw the publication of his fi rst monograph. The paintings dating from 2004 to 2007, executed using mixed technique, some of which were large format, focussed on male subjects of knights and warriors, represented tone on tone on luminescent and monochromatic backgrounds. Blocked in static poses, or encapsulating a moment in time, these science fiction figures in profile, with aerodynamic helmets and bull necks, inherited the elongated, frontal eyes depicted by the Ancient Egyptians and Giotto, but also certain structural archaisms typical of the naked warriors of the temple of Athena Aphaia on Aigina.

2008-2010

In Milan he took part in the exhibition entitled Jean Cocteau le joli coeur. Omaggio ”alla moda” di un seduttore, Palazzo delle Stelline, Centre Culturel Français. In July 2009, within the sphere of the Giffoni Film Festival in Giffoni-Valle Piana (Salerno), he took part in the exhibition Artabù. Icone della trasgressione while, invited by Museo Revoltella in Trieste, he showed a painting in the exhibition entitled Leonor Fini L’Italienne de Paris, along with the works of artists including Dorothea Tanning, Pavel Tchelitchew and Jan Lebenstein in a section dedicated to well-known friends of the great surrealist artist. On this occasion celebrated visionary art expert Laura Gavioli, curator of the section, interviewed him about his relationship with Fabrizio Clerici and Leonor Fini. In 2009 he showed work in Rome in two group exhibitions entitled Maestri in grafi ca and La grafica d’autore dal ‘900 ad oggi and in the exhibition, curated by Carmine Siniscalco, entitled Muro contro muro, held on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall.

At the Silber Gallery in Rome, in an exhibition entitled Giovanni Cozzi Eros Renzetti Anteprima, he showed some photographs by celebrated fashion photographer Giovanni Cozzi alongside his sculptures, both linked by a strong sense of glamour. In 2010 he was invited by Galleria Cà d’Oro in Rome and by Fondazione de Chirico to take part in a travelling exhibition Omaggio a de Chirico, a group exhibition held at various venues (Sculpture Foundation of Bergamot Station, Los Angeles; New York University, New York; Saint Thomas High School, Miami). At the homonymous exhibition

held in Rome in 2008 (Galleria Cà d’Oro, curated by Antonio and Gloria Porcella) Renzetti wrote this comment in the catalogue: Before de Chirico came Georges; in my memories of adolescence that is what his wife Isabella Far called him, reminiscing about him in those long conversations with Fabrizio Clerici which I sat in on in the Eighties. Fabrizio often spoke of his brotherly connection with Alberto Savinio and of how he had swapped mostly painting and tempera recipes with Giorgio de Chirico as early as 1938. Subsequently I saw many publications and at the Art Institute I learned the titles of almost every one of his paintings by heart. But the first one I actually saw was Melanconia, painted in 1912, in London.

What lingered with me after seeing some of his works ( I recall the large anthological exhibition in Rome at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna) was the attitude of sweet abandon of many of his figures. It was a form of abandon, even though at times it was not so sweet, which I assimilated and blatantly mimicked in some of my paintings. Per de Chirico is my current homage to the painter of metaphysics: a digital elaboration which associates a little known painting of his - La profezia del saggio painted in 1915 - with one of my androgynous knights.”

In 2010 he showed his work in a solo exhibition in Rome entitled Di padre in figlio, held at the Galleria Monserrato Arte ‘900. While his object-sculptures of the Ritrovamenti series– heads made of different materials and in hybrid fi breglass, decorated to the point of hyperbole- reverse the sense of the memento mori of the celebrated skull made of platinum and eight thousand diamonds with which Damian Hirst scandalised the public in 2007, the ambiguous vanitas expressed by the beautiful male bodies of armigers which metamorphose into pink flamingos take us to a world of imagination made up of x-rays (capturing what lies under the skin of things) and dressing up (constructing lateral thinking and the personality), while continuing to shock with their glamour. Almost as though to mock again the absurd tragicomedy of the real, Eros began to experiment with cross-pollinations, but also with whimsicalities and with semblances. As in the past he took his lead from the old masters but, increasingly, turned to fantasy cinema. One finds surprising analogies between his knights at the end of the Nineties and some fi lms, such as 300 (2007), directed by Zack Snyder, or the character of Jake Sully in Avatar (2009), directed by James Cameron, who somewhat resembles a head he painted in 2000. There is, moreover, no lack of oblique tangencies with pop music, with videos and with the staging of the shows of Madonna and Lady Gaga. This being in one’s own historical period in terms of the figurative imagination is, however, underpinned by a traditional mode of painting. Today Eros Renzetti still works employing a slow, controlled and perfect technique that involves a skilled dexterity which is not visible to the eye but is there nonetheless.

2011

In February he showed two works at the exhibition Quindici artisti in memoria della Shoah at the Old Jaffa Museum of Tel Aviv and was invited to the Venice Biennial where he exhibited at the Italy Pavilion curated by Vittorio Sgarbi. On this occasion Vincenzo Consolo wrote: “I chose to present artist Eros Renzetti at the Venice Biennale, in the Italy Pavilion at the Arsenale, because I found this artist’s work very striking and persuasive. His male figures with helmets, like the warrior of Dodona, seen in profi le, his “presences” of faces, his nudes, his “tattoos” and, above all, his colours, reminded me of the great surrealist painting of Leonor Fini, of Fabrizio Clerici or of Alberto Savinio”.