Piero Guccione. Nato per la pittura

Piero Guccione. Nato per la pittura
Curated by the Piero Guccione Archive
With texts by Elisa Pontiggia and Michele Gulinucci
Allemandi
Italian
2024

On January 10, 1993, the Rai Radio program “Landscape with figures. Witnesses and interpreters of our time” welcomed the painter Piero Guccione. An exclusive interview, conducted live by Michele Gulinucci and art critics Lorenza Trucchi and Guido Giuffrè, that peered into the silent world of an artist who spoke little about his work and even less about himself. To celebrate the 90th anniversary of his birth (1935-2025), the Piero Guccione Archive offers the transcript of this interview, which lasted more than 3 hours. The book is a touching journey into the personal universe of Guccione’s painting, enriched by the critical essays of Dario Micacchi, Dominique Fernandez, and Leonardo Sciascia, and by the words of praise and deep respect expressed by writer Gesualdo Bufalino and by playwright and art critic Giovanni Testori, interviewed live during the broadcast. The book’s 19 chapters, each with ample iconographic material, trace the exhausting “adventure” of being a Painter in an era in which “painting was very arduous because at times you had the impression of being a Don Quixote, that is, having to use a shield and a lance in an age of missiles.” Painter of the visible, Guccione spoke of the need to “invent a way to be clear every day, even after painting for 40 years,” until that emotion, felt by the eyes and filtered by the mind, once again (and slowly) became “clear” on the canvas, always and solely through all the attributes that pertain to painting. The book includes a QR code so that readers can listen to the original audio of the comments by Bufalino and Testori as well as to the dialogs with Guccione, recorded on the beach of Sampieri, Sicily and in his studio in the country outside Modica.