GRIMALDI

My pictorial technique has early roots.
During thirty-three years of profession, it has been undergoing trasformations, changes, recurrences and removals from the main sources of my reserch: the secrets and the alchemy of medioeval pictorial technique. I' m autodidact and, even if since I was a child I had shown a strong predilection for colour, it was at the age of sixteen in front of a Durer's engraving, that I've decided that art would have always been present in my life. So I started drawing by imitating the drawings of Andrea del Sarto, called Andrea without mistakes, for the perfections of his stroke, Perugino, Leonardo, Raffaello..... At first an uncertain sign on white paper, then always more secure on paper that I began to prepare and age. To enter completely in this world that started opening in front of my eyes, through my father's job, I started going to printing - works, where I used to work for a period. I' ve passed from drawing to colour at the age of eighteen, in Spain. I got in touch with the spanish circles through some friends which were artists, and I knew managers of art-galleries and collector. I began to paint in the studio of Manuel Ruiz, a young abstract-expressionist who lent me canvas and colours. I painted his portrait in a classical way, by setting it in the 17th. century, and the contrast between my picture and the expressionist paintings sketched with a violent colours, made me feel as a stone in the water which, even though outside it is wet, inside it remains dry. I was persuaded, and I'm still, that the right way was running along all the ingenious stages of past art, by transforming them in a personal way of expression, relying on history and contemporaneity, past and present. This strong classical root charmed many collectors which commissioned me their portraits, strictly set in ancient times. Later, the fashion of 'portraits in costume' would have exploded in Italy, involving famous personagrs of political world and show business, showing that my intuitionswere right. As I came back to Italy, and finished my scientific studies, that I had started before my conversion', I began to paint as profession. The way of Art was open.
For six years I've been studying pictorial techniques of ancient art, from late gothic to renaissance, and through ' Trattato dell' arte' by Cennino Cennini, a basic book of prescriptions of middle ages written at the end of XVI century, through 'Trattato d' arte' by Leonardo da Vinci and through ' Le vite' by Vasari of XVI century, I've been visiting art workshops of Cimabue, Duccio da Boninsegna, Simone Martini, il Pisanello for the late gothic, Beato Angelico, Piero della Francesca, Verrocchio, Ghirlandaio for the renaissance.
I smelt the scent of glues and plasters, I heard the sound of the pigments minced by the boy, I saw the master at work, helped from his pupils according to their skill. For six years I've been following the rules of the workshop, preparing minced chalk and rabbit's glue melted in a bain-marie, and using it to the wood or the canvas six times and mixing the pigments in powder with oil or egg according to circumstances, trying to own the 'Art of colouring'. For ten years I've been painting neoclassical subjects and portraits set in different ages. Nymphs, ladies and sirs, mythologic animals were my companions,light blu distance, clouds with bizarre shapes, smoky horizons were my landscapes. In 1987 I was painting a know collector's portrait, set in XV century. As scene-painting I had chosen a medioeval foreshortening of Perugia. Painting those coloured, those houses, those merlon towers, those pointed archs gave me a new emotion; not characters but places of my research, not faces or bodies, but towers and churches as a symbol of a research, ancient and modern at the same time: self-knowledge. This was the new essential point: not a revival of ancient times or as an imitation of nature, but history as culture. Knowing maens understanding. History is not imitated, but it is understood and places in our time and our space. This moved the barycentre of my interest for ancient from a remote time to a lively contemporan.
The ancient, emptyed of 'historical' time and space, becomes symbol and container of new and personal discoveries. From this point the elaboration of architectonic compositions, where memory and dream livetogether with reality and appearance. From this moment, I'll paint only monuments and buildings of oneiric, calling them ' Oneiric Villages'.
My pictorial technique also changes, to meet new demands of expression. I've started changing the support, from canvas to wood, which is harder and safer to receive my ' impasto'. I've changed the ' impasto' by adding to chalk also marble powder and cement, to get a preparations similar to a scraped off wall, signed by the time. To stress this effect, I make my ' impasto' smoother in sore points, and I spread the colour many times, waiting that the previous coat of paint is dry. I remove and mix these colours with wet sponges, to create accidental shades, similar to the ancient ones, as a ruined and spotted wall. Wood is finally ready to receive the drawing and the painting. The following step is the ideation and the drawing of the picture. For the ideation of the picture, I leave that the spots, which I have previously created, excite my fantasy. This procedure is similar to the psychoanalitic metod of unconscious projection, used both in moder art ( surrealism, dadaism) and the ancient art. Leonardo da Vinci used to stare at spotted and scraped off walls, where his fantasy projected forms and colours to emerge from the depths, lanscapes of the mind, half sacred and half pagan, where fascination and mystery live together in a world's domain which doesn't exist. Reason calms down and absorption off mind becomes silence. A plunge into the boundaries of everything, in inner places, steppe of mind where only heart can move, and in this disquieted poetry one finds himself vulnerable, thus still able to be amazed. Once I finish drawing, I start distempering, completing the picture. After isolating the surface, I use oil- colours to harmonize, strenghten or fade the tones, spreading transparent thin layers one over the other to create the veiled atmosphere of sensation. The gold light of golden or silver leaf, which I apply following the gilding technique used in the XII century, strenghtens the symbolic aspect of union between ancient and modern, between tradition and contemporaneity, as an icon revealing the limit between material and spiritual through precise elements ( comets, constellations, volcano, glows). The last patination with wax, as the ancient encaustic, gives a golden light to the colours, isolating and protecting the work forever.