The Artist

Saint Francis of Assisi is an iconic figure of universal reference, the most popular saint and at the same time the most revolutionary in his moral idea of evolutionary values and civic actions. In the arts he has been interpreted in a myriad of ways and versions, attributable to the human need to preserve certain figures within the archetypal reason of myth, where the roots lie upon which humanity builds its collective consciousness.

Giorgio Lupattelli, an Umbrian artist with a solid museum career, as early as 2001 created a large altarpiece dedicated to the Saint, commissioned by the Jubilee Committee of the Church of Magione, the artist’s home town. THEOPHANIA, developed by Scrinium together with Lupattelli, represents the natural development of an approach that belongs to his formative fabric, to a system of thought we find in his experiments between drawing, painting and contemporary technologies.

In the project dedicated to Saint Francis, scientific, philosophical, religious, artistic and broadly cultural values are blended. We find the ancient Umbria of the Renaissance masters, Perugino, Raffaello and Giotto, and that of the great contemporaries, from Gerardo Dottori to Alberto Burri, without forgetting the foreigners who left memorable works on the territory: from Alexander Calder’s Teodelapio to Gino De Dominicis’s Calamita Cosmica, from Arnaldo Pomodoro’s Infinite Column to Joseph Beuys’s Blackboards.

The result is a great journey between memory and dreamlike imagination, between vision and interpretation, a panoramic sounding that recreates a theatre of living memory, of pedagogical release upon the viewer, of the precious fabric through which true contemporaneity is built.

Lupattelli’s approach is that of a satellite observer analysing every surrounding phenomenon, from the real landscape to contemporary media, from the collective imagination to the echoes of an archaeological memory that continues to settle into the cultural heritage of Umbria. From here takes shape an elaborative process that builds a narrative: figures, landscapes, architectures, public works and fragments of visual memory combine into new configurations, giving rise to worlds in which history, imagination and vision coexist in the same space.

The artist’s modus operandi develops through a long design phase in which observation, iconographic research and technological experimentation coexist. The images are progressively elaborated until they reach a compositional synthesis that precedes the making of the work. If we think about it, the Renaissance artists too built the architecture of the painting through studies, sketches and preparatory cartoons before the final execution. In this perspective contemporary technology does not replace the artistic gesture but broadens its tools of research, becoming part of that process that leads from intuition to the completed image.

There are many ways of standing before the figure of Francis, even though everything is often reduced to the bond with nature and the forms of renunciation. Lupattelli, with empathetic intelligence, shows us the Saint in his gentleness but also in his power, in the wisdom that radiates through the physical territory and the spiritual geographies, in the actions of a curious and loving young man, capable of taking a stand with the never vulgar sharpness of right-minded gazes, turned to the future while overturning the stasis of the corruptions around him.

The works recount Saint Francis in a surprising and contemporary way, exalting a genius loci that the landscape integrity of Umbria still allows. The artist interprets his own Francis with the physiognomies of the present and in modes that leap beyond archaic time, modulating a portrait, and at once a self-portrait, to be dressed with our gaze, our civic culture and our moral system.

In the works emerge references to Burri’s informal art and to Calder’s imposing Teodelapio, to De Dominicis’s monumental skeleton and to the landscape of Lake Trasimeno, as far as the citations of Raffaello’s Marriage of the Virgin and the Giottesque stylings. Never casual citations, which are activated in Lupattelli’s iconographic ritual and in his dreamlike landscapes, where the rules of space and time are continually redefined.

The twelve panels, the generative heart of THEOPHANIA, develop as many themes inspired by the Laudes Dei Altissimi and take shape also from some intuitions of Ferdinando Santoro, originator of the project’s trigger from which the itinerary set out. In them the complexity of the processes finds a gentle synthesis of figuration, while citations, symbols and cultural memory converge into a vision able to restore to contemporaneity the generative force of the Franciscan message.

Gianluca Marziani, critical text for THEOPHANIA.