Francesco Bertolini, whose artistic pseudonym is Bertocesco, is a self taught man who experienced hard work in agriculture and in his workshop. A man who has always known the hard work of moulding iron and sculpturing marble to achieve the “form” which his inspiration exacted every time. 

This is essential to understand Bertocesco’s artistic evolution in his continuos search for plastic form which has its best examples in works of small size (but he is also the maker of more standardised monumental works such as the “Soidier Monument”  located in front of the entrance of Bovolone Hospital; or ”Totem” a wrought iron work located in Villa Balladoro in Povegliano Verona). He used as raw materials local marble or stone such as Carrara white marble or red Verona Marble e working them with the same long end toiling manual procedure of ancient workshops. Bertocesco’s rural and artisan background emerges in his works which are both primitive and naif and deeply mother earth evocative. The ties with the earth and its gifts such as stone, wood, clay represent a privileged area for sculpture research.

In ltaly a lot of artists have spent their apprenticeship in small! workshops; let’s think of Martini, Minguzzi, Marino Messina just to name but a few big names. To the artisan heritage just add the rural background with its culture and religion which often merges in the magic world, traces of which can be traced back both in the old “Capitelli” of veronese mountains and in nineteenth centuiy sculpture.

Sometimes his art has been influenced by the teaching of some second rate scholar but more often is free and suspicious of of external contamination. It  traces back to the popular Renaissance  ”umanesimo”, the most important artists or which were Donatello and Tino da Camaino. ‘This is  Bertocesco’s environment and within this historic frame it is possible to locate his artistic life. in the following volume you will find some groups such as: “the Portraits”, “gli Omaggi”, “i Gobbi”,”Anirnal Totem”,”Abstract works”.

As for the later abstract works, I do not think the source of inspiration and the immediacy power of this artist lie in these works, being, in my opinion, just a forni of contamination with academic trends. I, instead, would recornmend to follow the catalogue sequence starting with the” Portraits”.

Startingly” The Portraits” seern to be endowed with a pulsing soul in their stone frame: you can perceive deep sadness in”Woman's .Shape”; perplexity in”George”; the old saggezza in”Roman with Hat”; the sigh in           ” Unfinished work”; the benevolent smile of in”Geotge’s Friend”; the tiredness of”The Pilgrirn”.

In the first group you will discover the sense of magic of great part of the rural heritage as far as life and nature mysteries are involved: the group of”Gobbi”  traces back to the same ancient times when the legends of Lessinia (the name of the mountains around Verona) originated. The “Lian Shaped work”and”Mascherone” (The Mask) evoke pagan rites in remote areas of the mountains, “Ladyhird”,”The Angei”,”Green Figure Head”and other works belong to the same magic world o inspiration.

A differeni thing are the “Trihutes” chiefly”Tributes tu Venire”: in these light coloured marble works we can witness the passage from rural culture to city culture essentially in the mask and carnival themes. This interest in themes, already exploited in Italy by Boccioni, shows Bertocesco’s attitude to move  throughout different  artistic fields to test, every time, new materials and forms.

 

Francesco Butturini