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Lucilio Fiocchi - Neoimpressionist painter

 

 

 

BIOGRAPHY

 

 

Born in Pavia in 1931. Fascinated by paints since childhood, he eagerly devoted his efforts to them as though driven by a form of instinct. At seventeen, already having mastered the technique of oil colours, he turned his attention towards an impressionist style, the fruit of impetuous brushwork and youthful enthusiasm. He often makes use of the spatula. In the meantime, he studied both classical and modern painters, but he remained fascinated by the spirit of the Nineteenth century, the Tousled School (the Scapigliatura) and the Macchiaiolo style. During this period his subjects are varied and multiple in nature: from the wild beauty of horses to the sarcasm of the clown, from sketsches of landscape to very broad views of the countryside of Lombardy.

     But his painting evolved. From a crude impressionist style he slid towards a more refined technique that, at present, is nearer to the realist style of a Courbet than the impression of light that is a Monet. His drawing has become more marked, more secure and decisive. The colour is more plastic, more realist, to the point of taking possession of the work itself and communicating the emotional tone of the picture. Contemplation, solitude, nostalgia, meditation, all is expressed more with the colour than with the subject. Fiocchi, as a good Impressionist painter, makes use of sensations of light to a great extent, filters them through his spirit and translates their effect onto canvas.

     In 1965 he was one of the founding-members of the Pavian Free Painters’ Association (L.A.Pi.Pa.). He organised collective exhibitions and proposed artistic initiatives in great variety. With his Bohèmian artistic personality, he won over both critics and the general public.

     Pavia, his dearly-loved city, has urged him to a great many works, reappraisals of the old quarters of the town, a close analogue to his life as an artist for him. Tottering houses, old buildings, crumbling alleys, old things from which his artist’s animus draws poetry in their solitude and when contemplating them.

     But his colours seem to be galvanized when confronting nature. The fluvial landscapes of Fiocchi are fashioned in hues that are full of gentleness, concurrently real as regards the exterior world and his inner state of being. The skies full of cloud, typical, in fact, of the Lombardian countryside, reflect his melancholic spirit, that very spirit that blossoms from the minute description of alleys or sporadic portraits.

     Fiocchi is a poet as regards colour, a modern man dressen in the Nineteenth century fashion and who still possesses love for nature and the environment that surrounds him.