Two notes on Vanni's works and poetics
by Marcello Pecchioli

Vanni

Let's talk about color, colors and landscapes. Vanni's images have to do with the brightness of Mediterranean landscapes, with a chromatic palette that we find in the sea views, in the corners and in the ravines of a nature not violated, edenic fragments of terrestrial paradises that we are not able to see completely if not through an iconic, sometimes very subtle window that the author seems to make available to us, with extreme discretion and modesty, but by reclaiming his chromatic and figural environment. It is an almost elementary, basic, primitive way of seeing painting, in which the visual structure of the perceived seems to be a kind of realistic, inviolate mirror of our ancestral memories and memories. There are no human or animal subjects in these images but only a kind of frozen silence in which we could think of catching environmental noises and sounds that, however, painting, by its very nature, is not able to give us back but that the painting of Vanni can, however, try to evoke us. So we are left with these unexpected colors, these chiaroscuro, these marine and woodland landscapes, this theory of colors, leaves, flowers, natural architectures, ravines, cliffs, rocks, beaches, as if the world we know and which has made our habitat a global place with great anthropogenic significance and which has permanently changed all other places on the planet through human work, had almost been canceled all of a sudden and removed from a painful, ephemeral, casual nature but which has become, however, the only protagonist and actress of our visual and mnestic level, at least judging by the canvases and subjects depicted that never show traces of human beings. So here it is a question of understanding whether we are faced with a last epigone of Impressionism, an author who looks at the works of Rousseau the Doganiere and Ligabue, or Monet, an explorer of uncontaminated nature, in which the signs and the traces of civilization have been hidden and erased forever, as if the world was born yesterday and the human footprint never existed. But the type of works by Vanni are to be subtracted, there are no exotic ambitions or the exhibition of fantastic fairs and of animals, birds and large predators such as, for example in Ligabue, nor knots of young women dressed up for outdoor walks nor people who converse, amiably, in small groups of friends, like, in fact, in Rousseau il Doganiere, or as in the meeting of friends in Claude Manet's “Dejeuner sur l 'herbe”. Essentially, instead, we are faced with elements that we could call memories of a Mediterranean scrub, the oldest and most long-lived of the eco-systems of ancient Italian vegetation, still present on Italian soil for at least a few millennia of years to date. So only a few aspects remain, the vegetation, the nature, the colors, the brilliance of the paintings, the voids, the deep silences, the unexpected chromatic windows. The figural spaces. And then other empty spaces and fixity come to mind, those of metaphysics, of De Chirico's architectural spaces and silent squares, the suspended atmospheres of Delvaux and Magritte, the other dreamlike and exotic spaces of Dalì and Max Ernst . Let's say that in Vanni's paintings we could see some aspects of the echoes of this type of painting, especially in the pauses, in the chromatisms and in the suspension areas. An indirect echo of what the surrealists have communicated to us but also the new metaphysics of De Chirico and his brother Savinio. But there is another element that I wanted to underline and it is that linked to the "jardin", to a circumscribed and delimited nature, which we find, for example in Eric Rohmer's intimate French cinema in which his realism is put at the service of the campaigns and of the summer vegetation of small villages in the French province, in which the great director often sets his small romantic dramas and comedies that show, in detail, the flourishing and luxuriance of nature and the cyclical unfolding of the seasons and the amorous passions of his characters . The same love for gardens and the fruits of nature in a film by Jean Becker with Daniel Auteuil, "My friend the gardener" in the role of a sophisticated Parisian painter who, after a long and conflicted friendship, with a gardener who looks after the vegetable garden and the garden in one of his summer residences portrays tics and behaviors in his latest pictorial production which will be entirely dedicated to the life and poetics of his friend gardener, who tragically died after a terrible illness. Here, we find echoes of this love for gardens and flowers also in some of Vanni's works and he himself studied painting in Paris and was able to capture some signs and stylistic features of the Impressionists, who evidently

Two notes on Vanni's works and poetics
by Marcello Pecchioli

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