CHRIS MINOLDI, AN ARTIST WITH A FREE SPIRIT

introduction by Veronica Palmeri

from a critique by Giorgio Chiesi

The journey through suspended worlds, between art and thought.

Chris Minoldi, Piedmontese by birth and Sicilian by adoption, chose Catania - after various pictorial experiences in Germany and Poland - both as a source of inspiration and as a place to live. Self-taught painter, with great technical skills, he uses art to give voice to his thought by transposing it into brightly colored worlds inhabited by subjects that are sometimes real and sometimes dreamlike. His works seem to scream: “Awake! The truth of things is never found on the surface but is hidden in the depths of their essence, you have to dig deep to find it… ”so his canvases become a gateway or a key to reading a new vision of reality.

“Minoldi is an artist with a free spirit and refined pictorial skills, he uses only colors prepared by himself, in an artisanal way, as was the case in the distant past of the history of painting. He is able to exploit the material wisely and the stroke of his drawing brings to mind the Florentine Renaissance school, referring to the technique of translating every space of the painted canvas into pictorial poetry. He is a dreamer and a visionary but his innate ability to imprint what he has inside on the canvas, transforming his unconscious into a smooth and easily understandable painting, makes him a great communicator.

Visiting an exhibition by Chris Minoldi, like the one recently hosted by the Emilio Greco museum in Catania, is a bit like traveling inside his imagination. There are places with a real flavor and familiar beauty like the basalt city that stands out against the volcano; along the way you will meet traditional icons and religious subjects inserted in contexts that bring them to symbolic dimensions; and then, a step further, the view changes sharply, unknown scenarios open up, imaginary and surreal landscapes, capable of capturing the viewer's attention by stimulating their curiosity. They are Minoldi's Worlds that at first glance appear as spheres, small terrestrial globes well placed in a universal order in which absolute calm reigns, but which on a deeper look leave inside the disturbing sense of the search for the invisible.

In his well-ordered and clean architectures, with delicate colors, jelly-like, warning faces emerge, built by overlapping veils whose stratification is perceived; in the cobalt stillness of the sky or the sea, extra-dimensional gashes open up, it is the painter who creates a passage door to accompany the spectator's imagination in the discovery of what lies beyond the image. This is the goal that Chris Minoldi seems to want to achieve through his art: he wants to wake man from limbo and shake him, make him perceive that in this world, so apparently ordinary, we must look beyond, without stopping at the first image but digging into deeper to grasp, or rather to try to understand, the truth. "

Giorgio Chiesi