Emanuele Filini
Oscar Piovosi, a Reggio Emilia artist from S. Polo d'Enza, began painting and exhibiting from the first half of the 1970s, then after a long period during which he did something else, he picked up his brushes again to produce the stuff of this last decade. Because of a label Oscar had stuck on him, " painter of clowns," I must admit that , in the past, he was guiltily overlooked by me. I must explain. I was always strongly prejudiced against those artists who used clowns to communicate art, because I considered it an easy and convenient shortcut to get at expressing feelings through a series of coded stereotypes.
Then I got to know Piovosi's paintings more thoroughly. In his clowns, the heavy stage makeup never completely erases the real expression of the subject, always highlighting and distinguishing the dual personalities, authentic and forced, the real feelings and the heavily caricatured ones. Then there are the masks, which I consider an elegant pretext for inserting a happy touch of metaphysics into his painting. In painting the human figure, Oscar Piovosi always tries to make the postural nonchalance obvious without forcing the naturalness, these figures must give the idea that they can also move if necessary. Then there is the portrait. A real trap for those artists who do not go beyond the search for a somatic resemblance. Oscar follows two paths : either he penetrates inside the subject through the gaze, or he catches him in one of his habitual attitudes, recognizable by all.
Landscapes and still lifes. The descriptions are always punctual, rigorous, easily found, although Oscar never wants to give up, commendably, to make painting beyond the mere representation of reality, finding solutions in that immense heritage that Impressionists and Expressionists have left us.
The part of Piovosi's work that I find most interesting is his current quest to go beyond the safe and proven canons of traditional painting, using photographic framing, forced perspectives, decisive cuts of close-ups to highlight the following ones, to the benefit of a composition in which the distribution of volumes can become bold and anti-academic, while remaining harmonious and stimulating. The kind of painting that, for convenience, we call neo-figuration, but which does nothing more than follow the dictates of "good painting."
"The Journey," L'Ottagono Municipal Gallery, Bibbiano, RE
August 2010