Renato Cuzzoni - Milan, 19 February 1975
The art of Angelo Marchetti appears to us simple and complex at one and the same time. This Milanese artist, no longer in his first youth, who has no long habit of solo exhibitions for the simple reason that his retiring nature never attached much importance to them, presents himself at last with a thoroughly compelling survey of his most recent production; not a retrospective, then, since his earlier works are by now untraceable, well placed yet dispersed as they are among a multitude of collectors, small and great alike. For this is a painter surrounded by an ardent consensus of observers, not unknown to the public, from the most cultivated and culturally prepared to the most unschooled, though perhaps for that very reason the more sensitive and spontaneously honest.
The man Marchetti is shy, but the mild gaze with which he observes the world and those he speaks with might nonetheless prove deceptive, the audacity of Marchetti the painter being of a disconcerting virulence, beyond all possible imagining.
A man of few readings, but essential ones; the Gospel above all! And therefore, just as the divine testimony of a transcendent reality was spread abroad by the evangelists through a plain language within reach of every mind, even the most untutored, so the themes of our painter are treated with traditional forms and figures, leaving not the slightest room for expressive uncertainty; and the discourse is born and unfolds with evident simplicity and clarity, in a constant concern to be understood by anyone; because true great art lies precisely here, that is, in being purged of every pseudo-philosophical lucubration, of itself destined only for the abstruse élites of para-culture, who make no history but only tedium, neurosis and paranoia.
The painting of Angelo Marchetti rests on a drawing of the highest quality and force, set down almost in a single rush -so it would seem- and spontaneously, to lend expressive support to an idea that has burst forth in the artist's spirit and is at once realised with vehemence, at an incredible speed of execution. They are horses that gallop, that rear, that struggle, and riders who fight in furious mêlées, and men who writhe in pain, tortured, wronged, humiliated, and squalid, gaunt Don Quixotes.
The forms are heightened and deformed and powerfully declamatory; a sculptural symbolism that signifies, with great effectiveness, the eternal dualism of the human condition: the two realities that represent the focal points of humanity's life: the instinctive and predominantly outward one, where the primordial instincts of sex, of hatred, of violence are unleashed, and the spiritual one, and therefore inward, of awareness, of balance and of choice, in a cathartic overcoming of the necessity of matter towards an ideal of perfection and love.
The technique with which Angelo Marchetti makes his paintings is simple: lean colours, almost without body or thickness; one senses that the painter conceives his works on a large scale, to give greater prominence to his sculptural structures and his daring perspectives, set down thus in the anxiety to tell, devoid of compositional studies, preparatory sketches or anything else, almost in the Impressionist manner. The brushstroke is always dramatic; a possible error; even if evident or easily corrected, is always left in place, to make the pictorial discourse more incisive on the theme the artist has meditated upon and long reflected on.
Francis Bacon once said that "the painting is like a trap, which has closed, suddenly and at the moment chosen by the artist, upon a human fact and otherwise." All this fits the art of Angelo Marchetti perfectly. In his trap he has shut horses, men, the struggle and the suffering of creatures, their longing for love, the inbuilt suffering of matter yearning for the transcendent divine. Stupendous and evocative traps, these, in which one loses oneself -the author himself and the public alike- as in a labyrinth never to emerge from again, in the continual expectation of the miraculous appearing of a new light of truth from the depths of the last corridor, the darkest, the most sightless.
English translation produced with the aid of artificial intelligence. The authoritative text is the Italian original.