Carlo Guarienti was born in Treviso in 1923. At the age of 15, he discovered clay and the modelling possibilities it offers. Despite a deeply rooted fascination with architecture and historical monuments, an obsession that would punctuate many of his childhood daydreams, the young Guarienti decided to study medicine. This career choice was short-lived, however. As early as 1949, feeling disillusioned with his studies, he decided to dedicate himself solely to painting. But his time at the faculty of medicine was not entirely fruitless, as he broadened his understanding of morphology, anatomy and biology – and the various anomalies within the field. Guarienti’s trajectory going forward was one of studied independence. His encounters with the work of Picasso and Giorgio de Chirico and the growing popularity of abstraction in the aftermath of the war would not deter him from the Italian tradition of metaphysics which he held dear.
Following sojourns in Spain and Paris in the 1940s, where he produced and displayed some highly accomplished technical pieces, from 1956 Rome would become the setting for a substantial artistic transition that began with Birth of a Still Life. Past and present were intertwined through complex interplays of references and allusions. The passing and perception of time and the concept of memory constituted an underlying theme of Guarienti’s career. Objects as well as individuals were recurring themes of this temporal reflection. Items taken from various eras co-existed in anachronistic ensembles of increasingly monstrous figures in pictorial metaphors comprising what is now considered the Italian neoavantgarde.
The 1970s would bring about a further radical change. Guarienti’s figurative elements became more cryptic and further distorted. Whenever a new kind of logic would seem to emerge, it was immediately contradicted by the use of materials that added a textural quality. Plaster, sand and other simple elements such as wall fragments provided a grainy, tactile surface for the artist’s work. These elements conferred their own dispossessed, fragmentary, even broken memories, challenging the viewer on their own anxieties, solitude, doubts and emotional vicissitudes.
Guarienti’s precocious love for architecture has continued to manifest itself in his work, both physically and philosophically. Through liner, material and fragmented productions, memories, artefacts, edifices and ruins clearly emerged. In the 1990s in particular, interior and exterior spaces would be played off against each other. In that sense, his participation at the 1984 exhibition of art and architecture at the Pompidou Centre in Paris came as no surprise.
After being so aptly distorted, figures and landscapes would reappear in his later production, serving the same temporal research, but with a softer, more appeased type of poetry.
