This occurs, in particular, in the long repertoire devoted to clowns. "Painter of clowns" is the appellation by which the artist is mostly identified by the public: a label of which he is not at all ashamed, since his work is, precisely, addressed to the public (as well as to himself). But it is, like any label, reductive. Piovosi is not a "clown painter" in the sense that this is not all he is. It is enough to cite recent paintings such as "Masks in Venice" (2007) or "Masks on the Wharf" (2007) or, again, "The Lion of Venice" to understand how the faces, making their way amidst the triumph of colors and marked chiaroscuro effects, are beautiful to see but also to look at, in the sense that they invite the viewer to look deeply at them, to scrutinize them beyond the masquerade. To discover what? That life is an eternal masquerade, a castle of pretenses, a tragic but also somewhat ridiculous game....an invitation to weep or perhaps....to laugh? It is impossible to know: nothing leaks out from the remote fixity of these made-up and impregnated faces, which, even so, question the visitor with mute questions. In any case, beyond vain attempts to interpret, it suffices, we repeat, to look. In fact, the artist has always been sensitive, rather than to the call of the new "isms" of painting, to painting understood as tradition, as the cult of drawing and figure. The only "breaking" element is the chromatic range which, particularly in the gallery devoted to carnival masks and clowns, takes on an almost visionary timbre, accentuated by the contrast with the black outlines.
"Today everything is possible and, what is more important, no one is surprised": these are Gauguin's words, uttered more than a century ago, tragically relevant. Everything has now been used and abused, then the real transgression lies, perhaps, not in everything wanting to change, but in being able to remain true to oneself, to one's values. In fact, Piovosi lives painting as a value, an almost sacred value, to which he holds fast like the officiant of a rite. Because of this, because of the respect he has for an art understood as rigorous craftsmanship, to be approached with the attitude of one who has never finished learning, his repertoire, recent and past, also features excursions into areas of figuration other than the human subject, particularly landscapes and still lifes.

The landscapes depict mostly familiar places, on which the gaze passes veiled by the sublimation capacity of memory and, sometimes, nostalgia. The result is glimpses of solitary, unspoiled nature, where the risk of an overly illustrative rendering, of an excess of sentimentality is averted thanks to the use of an unusual medium: handmade paper. This landing, the result of a collaborative friendship with the Cavriaghese artist Andrea Acerbi, whom Piovosi has portrayed several times (e.g., "Andrea il Grosso" 2008) offers the brushstroke a porous, bumpy surface on which to expand, making the stroke soft and not at all scholastic, with an effect of studied approximation. See, in this regard, works such as "Canossa on the background of the Enza" (2008) or "The Enza at Guardasone" (2008). Beyond such thematic encroachments, among which is also the series of still lifes ("Grapes and Vases," 1986; "Lambrusco and Pomegranate," 1986; "Pomegranates and Persimmons," 2009) endowed with sober compositional harmony and a softened, suffused chromatics, what irresistibly attracts the poetic gaze of this artist remains the human figure. And the hand, the brushstroke, move accordingly. He is not, however, a man cast in a heroic, celebratory guise. Piovosi's man is a hero of the everyday: the portraits, which emerge like visions from a grainy, indistinct background, the artist can call them by name: they are "Nadia" (2009), "Andrea" (2009), "Giorgio" (2009), "Carlomagno" (2009).....Their features emerge from a search that the painter conducts not from the outside, but from within his empathy with them. Rarely do these faces smile and yet, in their absorbed and almost melancholy depths, they never appear gloomy. This is due to a nuanced chromaticism bent to chiaroscuro effects, as well as to the attention paid to the gaze as the focus of the representation. Not little for an artist who modestly does not hesitate to call himself a "painter of clowns."

 August 200