ARMANDO FELPATI - Italy -

CONTACTS: felpati@felpati.it

Closer to the sun

As the light breaks

acrylic on prepared cardboard cm 50 x 70

Touching the sky

Extraordinary planet

acrylic on prepared cardboard cm 50 x 70

Open book

Lives in color

acrylic on prepared cardboard cm 50 x 70

His Biography

www.felpati.it

The Review

Armando Felpati is the protagonist of a long career marked by a threefold constant of loyalty: to his own themes, despite the endless variations introduced; to the artistic circles he belongs to; and to places. The first point will be discussed; as for the decades-long service carried out in Associations and Galleries, something rare in other Italian areas, the taste for exhibiting together with trusted friends seems to me a Venetian trait and at the same time a reflection of the artist’s cordial nature. The fact remains that Padua’s cultural Associations seem to operate like the societies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when it was common for groups of painters to work together both in execution and in setting up exhibitions. It is easy to cite, in this regard, the so-called Barbizon School or the series of group shows by the French Impressionists and the German Expressionists, not to mention similar, though less close-knit, Italian examples. If one pays attention to the places where Felpati has exhibited, Padua emerges and perhaps even more its province. Looking at the list of exhibitions means revisiting the geography of the great Venetian province. In fact, Felpati’s career has unfolded through a series of fixed appointments year after year, with rare ventures beyond “his” territory. I appreciate the work but I do not know the artist, and therefore I will avoid rash considerations.
The first element to consider is an impressive mass of works built on two graphic inventions: the stylized little figures and the parallel scrolls that in various ways decorate his canvases, sometimes becoming the dominant element, the true subject. Other analogies could be found, but Felpati, in his own way, has limited himself to working in the same manner as Giuseppe Capogrossi, who established himself not for figurative works but for the invention of the “little comb” gracefully repeated a thousand times with as many variations on the theme. Yet the few significant critics of the Venetian master have insisted on his being a graphic artist rather than a painter. Which, in today’s scale of values, amounts to a judgment that diminishes his figure, that of a painter of great talent. Capogrossi, on the contrary, has always enjoyed higher regard. And yet the Roman artist built a career on an invention and expressed a motivation about the contents of his paintings perfectly analogous (“My ambition is to help men see what their eyes do not perceive: the perspective of the space in which their opinions and actions are born”) to that signed by Felpati: “I intend to offer the reader an interpretative hypothesis that does not stop at aesthetic superficiality, but grasps the intrinsic vision of the visual message.”
How can the difference in destinies be explained? Capogrossi was born in Rome to a family of noble lineage and had the support of critics and Galleries able to make an artist’s fortune. Felpati enjoyed none of these chances and is, in fact, still looking for a critic who can effectively interpret in depth and clearly illustrate his work.

Profile by Aldo Maria Pero – www.artedelXXIsecolo.it – June 2014

Armando Felpati’s works, since they do not convey figurations found in everyday reality, are subject to the viewer’s personal interpretation, who is called to interact with the author: this takes shape in an empathic relationship that is all the deeper the greater one’s sensitivity.
It is therefore not enough to understand what one sees in the painting; one must be able to feel the message it conveys. And this feeling depends on our ability to read it.
As a good reader, not as a critic, I find in Felpati an attempt, a tension toward another dimension that goes beyond the things we know in our daily life.
This dimension is marked by the absence: of matter as we know it; of man and his manifestations; of the deafening noise that characterizes our society.
It is a cosmic silence, a silence that invites meditation as a spur to contemplation.
The dimension explored by Felpati is laden with symbols that lead us to probe deeply the essence of being: quoting Mancuso, we are in a universe that is energy, an expanding energy, a source of continuous and perennial creation: we and matter are only its fruit and into it, sooner or later, we must be reabsorbed.
Immersion in the energy/cosmos dimension can be read as an attempt to overcome the existential malaise arising from the reality in which we are forced to live: a world that has lost every principle, that has given up seeking the meaning of life, that has lost its humanity. A world that lives on the surface, that seems devoid of meaning and prospects.
By projecting us into the energy/cosmos dimension, Felpati warns us, reminding us that in relation to the universe we are nothing, less than an atom.
Felpati conveys this vision of the great themes of existence through a painting we might define as expressive/abstract language; but, on closer look, it is born from the sign and completed with color, ennobled—indeed sublimated—thanks to light.
It is a gestural painting, but certainly not instinctive: his is a reasoned gesture, guided by a skilled hand, supported by a well-defined thought that each of us is invited to decipher and that helps us understand the world we live in.
The sign recalls his training as a graphic artist and creates continuous vortices, explosions, escapes: a sign that gives meaning to movement by identifying it with that primordial energy from which everything proceeds: a perpetual motion, image of creation in the making.
His sign also produces elliptical or circular forms that are lost in infinity in a projection of immeasurable spaces. They are scrolls that bring to mind the loss of the center of Nietzschean memory: they carry within them a sense of disorientation perhaps caused by that lack of a point or a foothold of reference that characterizes contemporary civilization.
Acrylic color, in its coolness and above all in its sheen, evokes outer space, seat of that energy that is still in a pure state, a continuous generator, still free of the contaminations produced when it became matter. The tones, often very intense, ranging from aggressive red to orange to pink, can be read as representations of fire, the highest expression of that primordial generative energy.
Finally, light plays a fundamental role in Felpati’s works. It has the ability and, I would say, the function of blending into a single whole the figurations the artist proposes, giving the work an extraordinary compositional balance that becomes a way of saying that the origin is not chaos, but that there is a higher order from which everything descends and to which everything, ourselves included, will have to return.
From all this it follows that Felpati’s works investigate the meaning of life; they do not intend to represent what exists, but being in its essence.
They are works that set before us universal and eternal dimensions in which being, which is energy, identifies itself in a universe that has no limits of space and time, that is not static but in continuous expansion, equivalent to perpetual creation of which we are only an infinitesimal part, albeit a thinking one.
Umberto Marinello
From the presentation of the exhibition Cosmic lines – changing direction at the P.P. Pasolini Library of Cadoneghe (Pd) - 14 December 2013

There are many ways to express the discomfort of living in a world that seems to have lost all modesty, among people who spend themselves only for their own gain, having set aside every sense of humanity.
Some shout, some protest, some denounce.
But there are also those who instead let themselves be carried away by imagination and offer, in exchange, a non-place where one can take refuge and immerse oneself in total silence where harmony reigns.
Armando Felpati is one of these.
He is essentially a graphic artist who moved into painting: this is shown by the precision of the mark, a sure gesture guided by a skilled hand, the exactness of the interweavings and vanishing lines, the explosions of immense bodies that seem ungovernable, scrolls that cross creating the impression of a perpetual motion that, looking at the whole, leads you to identify a balance and a harmony that have nothing to do with, or share with, our world.
Acrylic color, with its brilliance but also its coolness, transports the viewer into a sidereal world, where everything takes on a different value, where space is limitless, where energy reigns supreme.
Here, perhaps, is the deepest meaning of Felpati’s works: to rediscover where we probably come from, to foresee where we will end up, remembering that our true home is the universe where everything begins and ends in pure energy, making it clear that matter is nothing but a degradation of that energy.
And energy does not manifest itself only in the escape routes, in the explosions, in the tangle of scrolls: giving it a connotation of movement without limits, of an ungovernable force, of a space that surpasses all our knowledge, of a dimension that goes beyond what we know, of a universe in continuous expansion, is the light which, together with color and sign, is the fundamental element that allows the painting to come toward you, almost to attack you, making you understand how small we and our world are.
Yes, Felpati feels projected toward horizons so vast that they end up unsettling even our thinking.

Umberto Marinello - A character a month from Quatro Ciàcoe - June 2013

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