Renato Cuzzoni
Biography and artistic personality: Angelo Marchetti was born on 10 January 1930 in Milan (though only the following day was he registered with the civil registry of the Municipality of Milan).
Alternating the work of painter with that of sculptor and engraver, Angelo Marchetti has succeeded in building a personal expressive idiom in which it is hard to separate the judicious handling of drawing from the sculptural and chromatic components. In the heightened gesture of his figures deliberately deformed and irregular one readily senses the perception of polyvalent stimuli, in which impetuosity and instinct seep through at every step, as if to bring out the psychological turmoil that continually grips the human being as he walks "spinte vel sponte" beneath the impenetrable shroud of his existence. "My intent," the Milanese artist declares, "is to search, search, search, in order to discover the logic by which I find myself in the condition and the position of a man. To express oneself through a medium in my case the figured image and at the same time to weigh inwardly the positive gifts and the negative stimuli; positive, as a recognition that I truly feel as such; negative in their every sense."
A diarchic component seems continually to surface in the works of this artist, who speaks of ceaseless struggles between hedonism and suffering, between Good and Evil, between Ormazd and Ahriman, which (one must, alas, agree) are the irrepressible legacy of the existential knapsack we drag endlessly behind us. The discourse that Marchetti puts forward with commendable conviction appears still more admirable if one considers for a moment that he converses without leaning on any support of school or academic training, but only on that of a personal and continual empirical layering, earned through his commitment as a self-taught artist a commitment we know to be ever more laborious and hard-won than any course of regular study.
Thought on art. "Art represents the essence of life itself."
Thought on life. "Life is awareness, a formation directed at grasping the most important sides of existence itself."
Critical documentation. "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 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."
English translation produced with the aid of artificial intelligence. The authoritative text is the Italian original.