Ritratti Espressionisti

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Twenty-eight are the "Expressionist Portraits" exhibited at the Café Imagina Gallery, curated by Roberta Reali, only one part of the production of works that Pietro Beretta, engineer, painted between 2019 and 2020.
In these paintings , Beretta has infused the experience of painting as an expression of a Matissian joie de vivre, of an élan vital shared with his wife, well-known interior designer, Annagret Engelberger for almost a twenty years, which also gave rise to a good number of ceramics and assemblages made with objet réfusé.
In this new series of pinakes the painter refines the tools he used in previous years: the
earthy and sandy material of the large paintings inspired by Tàpies and Burri, the layers of déchiré paper in the wake of Villeglé and Rotella the flat backgrounds and the Brut “sculptures” made with Annagret. The raw drafting of materials it is enriched with veiled transparencies, simultaneous contrasts, sudden illuminations: extraordinary chromatic effects obtained with the help of pigments purchased during a trip to Morocco and used sparingly in the material works.
The choice of subjects refers to a neo-primitivism that is now the territory of Street Art, but which in the past has united painters such as Matisse, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Rousseau, and then Fauves and expressionists such as Van Dongen, Vlamink, Jawlensky and Werefkin, who stayed in the theosophical Monte Verità, a pole of Utopia and
of international culture in the early twentieth century (Arp, Jung, Bakunin, Nietzsche, Max Müller, Kéreni, Isadora Duncan, Von Laban, Mann, Hesse), as well as the birthplace and first training of the artist who finds himself as genius loci and cultural reference in his works in a decisive, vital and sometimes full of irony way.
Auras and subtle psychological veils illuminate the strongly characterized faces of emerged men and women from the artist's unconscious, plastically engraved and simplified with a sure sign. The singularity of the icon refers to poetic Outsider, Naïf and Brut, to Chaissac and Dubuffet, to Schärer and Baj and to the contemporaries Condo, Basquiat, Valdés, sometimes recalling the classical, Renaissance and Baroque world, and finally merging into the portrait choral of a contemporary Spoon River