Niccolò Guarraci
Artist biography
Born in Cremona on 02 April 1979 Nicolò Guarraci grew up in Caorso, a small town in the Po Valley together with his Sicilian parents. He graduated from the Agricultural Technical Institute of Piacenza and then moved to Bologna, Faenza and Porto Azzurro for jobs ranging from technical work to acting.
Influenced by music, photography and cinema, Guarraci has thrived in alternative art communities that developed outside the gallery and museum system. For years, he worked independently in the production of jewellery, handicrafts and cognitive development toys.
He is currently carrying out an artistic residency at La Kap di Fontecchio, a municipality in the province of L'Aquila in Abruzzo.
From matter to colour, from chaos to essence
Nicolò arrives in Fontecchio at the beginning of August traveling in his car and bringing his entire imaginative world with him. He has boxes, colors, drawings, dreams, fears, anxieties like anyone who is about to start a small Copernican revolution and decides to start a new chapter in his life. To do this, however, you need to get naked, first with yourself and then have the courage to show yourself outside with a firm and strong voice. In the physical and then metaphorical journey from Piacenza to Fontecchio, Nicolò also brings with him a symbology of signs and colors that build, modify, expand, merge and then come together again to arrive from the condensation of the pictorial material to the rarefaction of color, up to the search for the essence of things.
The interest and passion for painting began at school when he attended the agricultural institute and his classmate was a boy who made graffiti. For the next five years, every day during school time, he continued to make sketches for his graffiti, and this greatly influenced Nicolò's imagination, leaving a deep mark. His dedication to painting and creating developed more systematically in 2020 during the first lockdown, when without aping anyone he takes the old high school pencil case and starts with what he had at hand: a blue marker, a black pencil, the chalks and what he had under fire without being able to invest in anything yet. And the material that best suits the condition of improvisation and necessity is paper, which becomes the preferred support for experiments and works with an instinctive, passionate and highly emotional character. It can also be read in the immediacy of the execution which foresees a technique tested and perfected over time in which a layer of dense and compact color is then spatulated with the mark of felt-tip pens, chalk, wax crayons and oil pastels which creates an ensamble expressive and engaging.
Even the symbols have changed in a time of life in the woods that leads you to remove and lighten yourself from superfluous things. There are no more rabid dogs, teeth, cries, clouds, rain or skeletons which borns from the impossibility of expressing one's emotions in the best possible way; here comes the moment when a bird-man soars lightly from the cage. The figures strongly marked and scratched on the paper become lines because it is precisely in the minimum that you find reality, certainty, what you need. Remove and lighten your thoughts, strip and lighten even the symbols. The new images, like in a new cave in Lascaux, no longer have words, but signs, there are lines no longer symbols. Threats have vanished and the passage of being a child as a dreamer, who wants more dreams, more hope, desire for simplicity, is manifested with a new imaginary. In this sense, the symbol of the bird-man is there to testify that one is no longer afraid to take flight. It's freedom, being light. Then we find a flock of birds, friends, with whom we can fly together while keeping our course without feeling inferior because we are all needed and we all contribute to the direction to be given to our lives.
Words are no longer needed. Words are boulders.
They are a terrible sound and, if repeated, even if it's not someone else that tells you them, even if you repeat them to yourself, they convince you in the for better or for worse, and for Nicolò it would be better to avoid them.
Take the present. Stay in the present
The words from accusations and screams scratched on the paper become poetry and writing and the sense of ut pictura poesis is recovered, which literally translated means "as in painting so in poetry" as used by Quinto Orazio Flacco in his Ars Poetica. In the Latin world the meaning of this statement is that painting is a silent poem and poetry a speaking painting which in Nicolò becomes the need to create connections and links between multiple artistic languages and to ensure that these connections act as a "mother yeast" generative that gives structure and form to a constellation of collaborations that hold together different forms of creativity. Poems are born from his pictorial works, which are then set to music becoming songs that inspire new developments in a flow that gives life to an innovative trend, to a need that looks intuitively and spontaneously at the theory of the creative impulse of Henri Bergson in where the internal strength of each becomes openness to the world to trace new paths of expressive research. From this spiral that constantly grows, starts a moment in which there is an action that changes the status quo: that change determines a series of further changes that fit into a harmonious flow, becoming an engine of growth and a creative engine for many more things to come. This mode shows what the main element can be, the right alchemy to grow in diversity.
Within a few months from his arrival in Fontecchio a radical transformation took place, and this transformation is obviously dictated by a different state of mind. All of Nicolò's production is very true, there is his whole world; what you see in these works is true because it is his intimate story without formal or aesthetic research, aiming only at the essence. In his work there is immediacy, sincerity, vulnerability and strength at the same time, there is the search for unity in diversity and understanding of human weaknesses as the uniqueness of each.
The collaboration of other artists present in Fontecchio confirms the vitality of the confrontation which is reflected incisively in the instinctive and anarchic way - abolishing any hierarchy between artistic languages and authorship - which makes each work finished in the quick and first draft, confirming the attitude punk, primordial and essential of Nicolò's artistic production: all of this can be used as a mirror in which each can be able to reflect and rediscover the essence of being and feeling in the right place at the right time, even if small and minimal, to become the center of one's world.
Valeria Pica
(From the catalogue The Bird-Man, critical text for "A Cura di Voi", exhibition at La KAP, 2022)
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