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| Italian and Flemish art of the fourteenth and fifteenth century provide inspiration for exquisitely detailed and haunting imagery. By Suzanne Cline
The haunting, poetic images created by Italian artist Alessandro Bavari, with their luscious textures and exquisite detail, are the fruits of a long journey of exploration to discover a personal artistic language that can transcend the limits of established media through what he describes as "a kind of contamination amongst the arts dissolving the boundaries which distinguish them".
Bavari's images make many references to the paintings of Italian and Flemish artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; Giotto, Piero della Fancesca and Hieronymus Bosch, amongst others. Not the grandeur of the high Renaissance, but the essentially humanistic outlook of the painters who wished to convey the pathos and pleasures of our inner lives. Bavari's works are Gothic in feel, with their fantastical imaginings, adoration of detail and fascination with the natural world. The size of your screen will not do them justice - these should be shown ten feet tall so you could climb into them to appreciate their complexity and wealth of content.
Bavari began making photomontages at the age of fifteen. He subsequently studied scene-painting and history of art at the Academy of Fine Art in Rome. He started working in a variety of traditional media, from oil painting to copper plate engraving, whilst maintaining a strong interest in photography. His working methods became increasingly experimental, mixing tar, glue and industrial paints and exploring the possibilities of photographic printing techniques. He then added imprints, creating a vocabulary from found natural objects, such as bones and fossils and creatures washed up on the shores near his home in Latina, just south of Rome. In 1993 he bought his first Macintosh.
Working exclusively in Photoshop to create his highly personal imagery, Bavari found he was able to arrive more easily at the fusion of painting and photography that he had been working towards. He regards the computer as another tool, "like a brush, palette or darkroom"
He has been published and has exhibited widely as both an artist and an illustrator. He is also art director at computer animation company Direct2Brain. As in all things Bavari blurs the boundaries: his clients take their cue from the work he is producing, rather than vice-versa, respecting the integrity of the source of his inspiration, be it music, the memory of a place visited or a story read. He is currently working on a series of paintings for a solo show, planning to make a short film and plans to produce an illustrated version of The Decameron by the celebrated fourteenth century Italian writer Boccaccio.
Suzanne Cline is a writer and multimedia artist in the UK. Her philosophy is that technology is for today but creativity is for life. She can be contacted at suzanne@numina.demon.co.uk
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