Massimo Giannoni

Massimo Giannoni is a Tuscan painter who lives and works in Florence. Born in Empoli in 1954, since his youth he stands out for his innate pictorial skills. He attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, where in 1979 he was awarded for the Lubiam Prize (Mantova), assigned to the best student of all the Fine Arts academies of Italy. He boasts a long series of European exhibitions and international fairs that are highly appreciated by critics and the public.

Giannoni's work is mainly based on the representation of places of accumulation, storage, places of memory. Libraries, stock exchanges, squares, natural science museums' showcases are his recurring subjects. The orderly or sometimes disorderly overabundance of information, both the once enclosed in books, and those of luminous numerical data on stock exchange boards, induce the viewer to a sense of vertigo.

Giannoni's research is focused on the environment and not on human nature, but at the same time it speaks to us about man and the inexorable passage of time, where objects remain, as opposed to living beings.

He uses a technique that evades the counterposed methods of abstraction and figurative, characterized by the layering of very pasty oil colors, which enhance the expressive power of the image that seems to vibrate. Distance is fundamental for the fruition of his artworks. The thick matter, spread out with a spatula, makes the contours crumble, the figure dissolves and only from a long distance it magically recomposes itself. Matter thus assumes a life of its own, detached itself from describing and becomes subject into the subject.

Among the many important retrospectives set up in public museum spaces we recall: in 2005, the XIV Quadriennale di Roma, "Fuori tema / Italian feeling", edited by G. Agnese, L. Caramel, V. Deho, G. Di Pietrantonio, M Tonelli, G. Verzotti, at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome; in the same year he took part in the exhibition “Il Paesaggio Italiano Contemporaneo”, curated by Marco Meneguzzo at Palazzo Ducale in Gubbio. In 2007 he was selected for the important retrospective "1968-2007, Arte Italiana", curated by Vittorio Sgarbi, for the Palazzo Reale of Milan. In 2011 he was one of the 10 selected artists from the Fondazione Roma, for the "54th Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition", at Palazzo Venezia in Rome, and in the same year he took part in the Mantua literature festival, with the personal exhibition "L'Aleph", edited by Alberto Agazzani, at Palazzo della Ragione in Mantua. In 2013, he participated at the exhibition "Mimesis", variations on the book, edited by Sergio Risaliti, at the Uffizi Library in Florence, and in the same year, he held the personal exhibition “Durata dell’Immagine”, curated by Flaminio Gualdoni at Palazzo Giureconsulti, Milan. In 2015 he was involved in the collective exhibition "Linee di confine", curated by Marco di Capua at the Bilotti Museum in Rome, and in 2016 he exhibited at the Jewish Museum of Bologna, the oil on canvas "Muro del Pianto", preliminary study for the development of a large triptych (200x600 cm), created for the personal exhibition "Four Triptychs", curated by Marco Tonelli, at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome in 2012. In 2019, during the anniversary celebrations of the Italian Republic, he inaugurates the solo show "Beyond the past", at the Palais des Nations of Geneva, Switzerland. In December 2021, Giannoni joined in the permanent collection “Quirinale Contemporaneo”, curated by Enrica Renata Mazzantini, at Palazzo del Quirinale, Rome.

Moreover, Massimo Giannoni's artworks have been sold in prestigious auctions houses such as Phillips in New York. Giannoni is represented by Italian and international galleries with which he exhibits in some of the most important art fairs in the world.

For the critics, Giannoni's works turn out to be "rooms of wonders" that becomes metaphors of another place, only apparently deserted, with shelves of books that contain all the knowledge of time or stock exchanges that seem to accelerate or fragment it.


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