Aldo Locatelli (Villa d'Almè, Lombardia, Italy, 1915 - Porto Alegre RS 1962)
Painter, muralist, teacher.
At ten years old, Aldo Daniele Locatelli contacts artists who restore the villa d'Almè church murals. In 1931, he joined the decoration course at the School of Free Courses of Technical Instruction Andrea Fantoni. Between 1932 and 1935, he studied at the Accademia Carrara di Belle Arti [Academia Carrara de Belas Artes], in Bergamo, Italy, and received a scholarship for the School of Fine Arts in Rome. Interested in mural painting, he began to study the works of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. He returned to Villa d'Almè after his father's death in 1940. In 1946, he moved to Genoa to work on the vault of the Nossa Senhora dos Remédios Church. The following year, he studies works by artists such as Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696 - 1770), Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519) and Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475 - 1564). He arrived in Brazil in 1948 to carry out frescoes at the Cathedral of Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, at the invitation of Bishop Dom Antônio Zattera. In 1949, the year in which he finished his work at the Cathedral, Locatelli became one of the founders of the School of Fine Arts of Pelotas, where he introduced the study of the artistic nude. He starts to receive orders in other cities, such as Caxias do Sul and Porto Alegre, and decides to bring his wife to Brazil. In 1951, already a Brazilian naturalized, he began the murals and paintings of the Church of São Pelegrino, in Caxias do Sul, a work that concluded in 1960.
Critical Comment
Although he also dedicates himself to Easel painting, Aldo Locatelli can be considered one of the most fruitful painters of frescos - especially -, active in Rio Grande do Sul, in the 20th century. In his short trajectory (he dies at 47 years old) Locatelli, in his country of origin, is guided by the Renaissance art for the frescos he performs. In Brazil, notably in the project of the Church of São Pelegrino, in Caxias do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, it works based on these standards both in the frescos and in the paintings of the Via Sacra: "Locatelli is undoubtedly a traditionalist; they are visible in his work The influences, of an iconographic and technical nature of the great masters of the Renaissance (...) But the artist's talent is such that he does not allow him to submit to them (...) being (...) germinal".1
The artist works in the frescoes of the Church of São Pelegrino from 1951 to 1960 and in the 14 oils on canvas on the Via Sacra - performed in his studio, in Porto Alegre -, between 1958 and 1960. Locatelli is photographed in the positions of Christ to compose the work. It seeks to express the pain of Jesus during the path of Calvary, being the "determining element of the drama and expressiveness of the work (...) without a doubt, the book by Pierre Barbet, the passion of our Lord Jesus Christ according to the surgeon, in which the sufferings are described physicists of the Passion of Christ from the point of view of Medicine".2
Notes
1 Zattera, éra stedile. Aldo Locatelli. Porto Alegre: Pallotti, 1995. p. 159.
2 FABRIS, Annaresa. Aldo Locatelli, the Cirineu in São Pelegrino. Insieme: Revista da Apiiesp, São Paulo, nº 3, 1992, p. 21. According to Fabris' text, Father Giordani, parish priest of the Church of São Pelegrino, would have been decisive in the initial conception of the Via Sacra. The parish priest would have requested the reading of Pierre Barbet's book, The Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, according to the surgeon, "desired to see 'the humanity of Christ massacred, as it really was'", as the author quotes. Locatelli, in turn, requires freedom of creation and time to perform the work (see page 20).
Criticism
"(...) his painting, full of energy, contrasts, movement, audacity, Dramas of drama that often went to the theatrical exuberance of gestures and uncontrolled effects, kept much of the spirit and character of Baroque painting. (...) meanings of the artistic form, it was also renewed, drawing from the vast resources of its talent a more robust, more concentrated formal expression and, therefore, more suited to the austerity and character of the mural painting. of art and in the possibilities of his spirit, he raised the consistency of his painting, purifying it, little by little, of superfluous elements and increasing his expressive power. Crucis who painted for the church of São Peregrino de Caxias do Sul, where he had already executed a vast final judgment on the ceiling, representation of the supper and other themes". Ayala, Walmir, ed. Brazilian Dictionary of Plastic Artists. Presentation by Maria Alice Barroso. Brasília: MEC/INL, 1973-1980. (Specialized Dictionaries, 5).
Carves
Accervo Rio Grande do Sul Art Museum Ado Malagoli - Margs - Porto Alegre RS
Church of São Pelegrino - Caxias do Sul RS
Pinacoteca Aldo Locatelli - Porto Alegre RS
Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul - UFRGS - Porto Alegre RS
Collective exhibitions
1953 - Porto Alegre RS - 4th Hall of the Institute of Fine Arts of Rio Grande do Sul
1954 - Porto Alegre RS - 5th Hall of the Institute of Fine Arts of Rio Grande do Sul
1961 - Porto Alegre RS - Riograndense Art Salon from the Past to the Present, at the Instituto Galeria of Fine Arts
Posthumous exhibitions
1972 - Porto Alegre RS - Retrospective organized by the Rio Grande do Sul Art Museum
1982 - São Paulo SP - Italian painters in Brazil MAM/SP
1983 - Porto Alegre RS - From the past to the present: the plastic arts in Rio Grande do Sul, at Cambona Centro de Artes
1999 - Porto Alegre RS - Show of Paintings and Drawings: Homage to Locatelli, at Espaço Arte Fiegas
2002 - Porto Alegre RS - Teachers Artists, at the UFRGS Museum
2002 - Porto Alegre RS - Drawings, prints, sculptures and watercolors, at the Art Garage
Source: Itaú cultural
