What are those festive balloons in front of the Pro Loco of Crema? It looks like a marriage, but it’s just an artistic partnership. In the exhibition hall in Piazza Duomo n.22 it is possible to visit the exhibition for free until 16 June 2024 (from 10am to 12pm and from 3pm to 6pm) The master and the pupil. The joy of painting! The master is Gilberto “Gil” Macchiwhimsical arbiter elegantae and “cremasco impressionist” who traveled the world to portray it on canvas. The pupil is Francesca Gnocchiveteran of the Pro Loco, who made her debut as a painter yesterday.
The student’s story
Francesca Gnocchi says: “I have been painting since I was a child, but they were more than anything else style exercises: chiaroscuro, perspectives, copies of famous paintings. I have always translated my emotions into images. My drawings and paintings for me I know piezz’ ‘and heart. I didn’t attend painting schools, so my teacher was my friend Gil. It is he who cultivated and liberated mine artistic side. One day she decided that I was ready to exhibit. I was drawing one still life in his study, with vases and alarm clocks scattered here and there. Since I use a lot of smileys on WhatsApp, Gil suggested I embellish an old alarm clock with a smiley face. He told me that I could do anything I wanted with art and that I should have fun. In the end I added not one, but on the dial three different smileys. I was very excited and rather reluctant at the idea of an exhibition with Gil, but he insisted so much that in the end he convinced me to take the plunge. Some of my works are real life scenesothers are just gods dreams. Perhaps visitors will distinguish one from the other.”
The words of the master
Gil Macchi, who needs no introduction in Crema, comments: “Francesca is very cultured, and this helps in the artistic field, as in every moment of life. For me this exhibition is the continuation of the experiment Art Bubbles from two years ago. In fact she is apersonal evolutiona step forward from a technical point of view. From the friendship with Francesca, a talented and remarkably gifted painter, one was born dual exhibition. They are very different art forms: I am more instinctive, she is more psychological. We both love Crema, but from my canvases the squares and roofs of the historic center emerge above all, from his the landscapes of the surrounding countryside. Francesca’s paintings are oil paintingsmy butterflies are made with spray colors”.
Crema roofs, bubbles of color and butterflies
Walking around the exhibition hall we notice – in addition to the proud and satisfied faces of Vincenzo Cappelli, Franco Bianchessi, Greta Russo and other Pro Loco superstars – small horizontal and vertical paintings. Some are made by mixing dyes with soap bubbles, which Gil Macchi blew onto sheets lying on the ground, leaving them free to fall wherever they wanted. From this fascinating experimentwhich imprinted elliptical shapes of color on paper, the exhibition was born Art Bubbles. Other works follow in which the roofs of Crema appear, snow-covered or not. Art is not photography. And so some rows of tiles become spirals that merge with the clouds, forming turbulences that recall the Starry Night Of Vincent van Gogh. In a glimpse of daily life in front of the post office, the hackberry planted by the count, musician and botanist from Crema triumphs Carlo Sforza France from Cadestellano. Immediately afterwards, here is the master’s stylistic leap: the color bubbles change into butterflies, which seem to delicately rest on them. As conclusive syncretisma small picture portrays colorful butterflies in the foreground, with the Crema skyline, full of bell towers, in the background.
Bucolic scenes, dreams and bicycle thieves
Francesca Gnocchi’s joyful, colorful and full of vitality canvases are accompanied by captions, literary quotes and small explanations. Let’s see a forbidden bathroom in the Reflection Lake of Ricengo, a aimless journey to discover the Crema countryside, one kite girl constructed with twigs and tissue paper, aaspiring painter who contemplates the landscape in search of inspiration, one shocked reader from the book The Master and Margheritait’s a blissful rest (with a straw hat worthy of van Gogh) among the willows of Santa Maria dei Mosi, a small rural hamlet of Crema. A few years ago, someone stole Francesca’s bicycle right in front of the Pro Loco (a scene immortalized in a drawing that has not been exhibited). Therefore we find a small picture that portrays Francesca while she buys one new bicycle by the Bossi brothers in Trescore Cremasco.
Critics and audiences
Paolo Mariani he writes in the presentation of the exhibition: “Just as the great artists of the past were trained in the workshops of the best masters of the time, so Francesca is exercising her innate skills as a painter at the school of master Gil Macchi. She teaches her with her painted lei […] it conveys to us a synthesis of emotions ranging from amazement to serenity […]. The promising student does not paint with her hands but with her head. It is her thinking and working head that dips the colors and moves the brush. The carefully chosen subjects, the engraved and harmonious colours, the accurate and detailed details, but also some still immature passages make these paintings a fascinating world to discover and investigate. […]. It is a joy to look at these paintings and decode the messages behind them.” The entire exhibition is “a hymn to nature and lightness”: words of Piero Carelli as a visitor.
