The person before the work: the restless, self-critical conscience, the emotional intensity, the affections (the marital bond, faith), the distance from the social world, and the inner contradictions lived as a form of personality.
Before he was a painter, sculptor and printmaker, Angelo Marchetti (Milan, 1930 – 2000) was a man inhabited by an inner life of rare intensity. Anyone approaching his work inevitably encounters the person: an acute sensibility, a vigilant and severe conscience, a disposition to introspection that runs through every gesture of his existence. To understand the man is not a biographical appendix to the reading of the works, but the very key to entering them.
A restless conscience
The trait that most sharply defines his inner world is a lucidity directed first of all at himself. Marchetti observed himself with a constant and often merciless attention, capable of a self-criticism that granted no concessions. This self-examination went hand in hand with an extreme sensitivity to states of mind, experienced without defensive screens: tenderness, despondency and ardour manifested themselves in him with an immediacy that shunned all posturing. He was, in this sense, a man who felt before he thought, and who made of feeling the very substance of his search.
From this intensity arose, too, a marked emotional reactivity, an alternation between moments of dejection and sudden surges of affection and trust. Self-command was for him a desired value rather than a peaceful conquest: a goal to strive towards, not a possession secured.
The affections and faith.
At the centre of his emotional life stood the marital bond, lived with a devotion that verged on veneration. The figure of his wife represented for Marchetti an absolute point of reference, almost the foundation upon which his very identity found its completion. Towards those dearest to him he showed an unreserved generosity and an openly declared vulnerability, far from any reticence.
Parallel and equally profound was the religious dimension. Christian faith was for him no surface matter, but the principal means through which to give order to pain and meaning to existence. His relationship with the divine, shot through with doubt as well, formed the ultimate horizon within which he placed his questions about guilt, about the worth of the person, about the meaning of suffering, his own and that of others.
The distance from the world.
Alongside his devotion to those closest to him, Marchetti cultivated a more wary relationship with the social dimension. Towards the outside world he kept a reserve that was at once choice and necessity: a distance that his biography confirms in his secluded position with respect to the movements and circuits of his time. This mistrust did not, however, exclude an imperative of charity and understanding that he acknowledged as a duty, in a tension never resolved between severe judgement of men and the need to love them.
It is in this coexistence of opposites that the complexity of the man is to be measured. The contradictions that run through his inner world—humility and pride, attachment to life and existential weariness, the need for union and the vocation to solitude—are not to be read as inconsistencies, but as the very form of a personality that chose to inhabit its own polarities rather than smooth them away.
Note: this portrait emerges from a body of private writings preserved in the artist's archive and is to be understood as an interpretative reading, not as a clinical report.
It renders the most intimate and inward dimension of Marchetti, which may heighten the aspects of tension and under-represent the more serene everyday life of an existence nonetheless devoted, with consistency, to creative work.