Biography

Vittorio Lo Cicero was born in Rosolini (SR) in August 1939. Since he was a kid, he has been fond of the painting of the so called Carretto Siciliano and of the pictorial art in general. When he was 16 years old, he decided to leave his native village and move to Rome where he had been working for six years in a carpenter’s shop. Once he had passed the competitive exam in order to get into the Police Department, he provided service first in Rome, then in Nettuno (Rome) and eventually since 1962 in Bozen, where he decided to stay for good. Throughout all these long years, he never gave up the wish to become one day an artist-painter, but the work responsibilities kept him away from dedicating his time to the pictorial art. Just after the retirement, at the age of 56 years old, he started to attend full of enthusiasm graphic arts and painting classes at the Art School of Bozen and he took part to the courses of professors such as Mario dall’Aglio, Benedetto Schimenti of the Association of Academics of Art, Giorgioppi and Gary Volcan at the Artists’ Association of the province of Bozen. At the same time, his daughter Tessandra decided to follow him through the pictorial art experience. Vittorio Lo Cicero have visited all the most known European Art Galleries, in Paris, London, Innsbruck, Prague, Budapest, Madrid, Vienna, Munich, Nuremberg and Amsterdam, in order to enrich his knowledge of the interesting Artworks. He started an intense research work that implies the study of the author’s artworks, his expressive style, the tones, the brush strokes, the veiling, the shade, his colours and his peculiar painting technique. He actually started a real challenge with himself, a way to compare his abilities with the art of the great painters, trying to follow their teaching and to pay homage to their artworks. Vittorio is a methodical and precise artist with an intense drawing study. He loves the beauty and works especially with patience. Therefore the completion of one of his oil paintings requires a long time, at least six 1 months, in order to be able to realise all the colours procedures in a natural way (veiling, shades, etc.) without using any desiccant or other chemical substances. He learned and practiced all the pictorial techniques: watercolour, acrylic, tempera, Indian ink, oil and also the particular veiling invented by Rudolf Steiner and the different chromatic combinations of A.W. Goethe. The aim of his painting is to create a chromatic composition that is able to distinguish itself thanks to a pulsing eloquence of the colour. Vittorio takes only Colour Motifs that are able to fully express their explosive energetic charge and convey sensations and deep emotions as theme of his artwork. Since 1993, he has taken part to the artistic life of his country and also abroad, showing his paintings, together with his daughter Tessandra’s ones, in some solo exhibitions and collective ones in several cities in Italy and in Europe, as well as in the main Art Exhibitions and Competitions, obtaining a positive outcome and gaining awards and rewards. Besides, he has been mentioned in the main Art Periodicals. His painting carrier started reproducing masterpieces of the antique and modern painting, following the approach of the old and contemporary Flemish Masters (landscapes, portraits, still life). Later he became an artistpainter, able to represent everything that exists in nature, completely in a handmade way, on pure linen canvases and with original and genuine colours, showing "Certificates and Guarantees". By now he has realised more than eight-hundred paintings for Italian and foreign collectors and appraisers. Vittorio Lo Cicero lives and works in Bozen in his studio placed in Viale Europa 152. He has often been abroad for studying reasons: Austria, Germany, Czech Republic, France, Bulgaria, Hungary, Great Britain, Netherlands and Spain. 2

It is a rare chance. But it can happen that a painter, who has never been in an academy of art, can paint anyway and convey the emotional invention into the shape and in the brightness that are able to surprise. They amaze the sharpness of the structure that holds the body of the image and the solar role of the colour. So Vittorio Lo Cicero, whom we are talking about, is a self-taught painter. As a retired in Bozen, he attended just few evening classes with Dall’Aglio or Giorgioppi, but not enough to develop that happy visual expression of figural poetics almost towards surrealistic tensions or American pop painting. We believe that Lo Cicero is actually right when he loves simply describing himself as a figurative painter. An adjectival use of the technique does not suit him, it is actually annoying for him and therefore it detaches him from the natural creative candour that allows him to paint how he feels. And Lo Cicero does not care if in the figurative image, as he likes to define his painting, arabesque motifs or informal colour bursts show up, as it happens for instance in Magia Solare, where they stratify the unconscious in dreamy atmospheres. From the painter’s point of view, it becomes fundamental to delete any kind of hesitation that impedes the image from showing its harmonious pleasantness. He feels the need to paint, just freely paint in order to be pictorially himself without any hoax. Maybe his radiant tonal painting, which lights up the paint with undefined borders, comes from his Sicilian origins (he was born in Rosolini in the province of Siracusa in 1939). Hence a certain particular impact of bright magic in Lo Cicero’s figurative art takes with it his native origin, as well as the presence of arabesque insertions in some images textures... It is a matter of a contemporary pictorial theme, which develops and it is connected to the emotion of its time both when the artist paints following the stimulus of the free imagination and when he shows a still life, a landscape, a nude or something else. The executive strictness releases the emotion of the congenial representation, which is capable of being ripe from the point of view of both value and the style that can boast vocation and virtuosity. The rhythm, the tone, the stamp, the subject of the compo- sition itself turn into means that help to give expression to a spontaneous poetic liberation. It seems that the subject comes out with an intentional effort from a dramatic hovel of the unknown in order to reach and live the sunny harmony of the real life without forgetting his dark origin though. So the pictorial image of Vittorio Lo Cicero becomes pleasantly popular. It is an emotional popularity that makes universal its push towards the gaze of "the other", of the external object that approaches the artwork and is pleased because of the nice recall that the image exhibits: its vitality, its dynamism and the trembling strength of the full spring colour, which pleases the serenity of the soul. The lyricism and the melody of the painting awaken in the expression going along with a resounding atmosphere that gives music to the most hidden wishes of the depths starting from the creative instinct and reaching the highest poetry of life.

Giuseppe Martucci 

Constructive Coloured Painting in comparison with the Aesthetic Pursuit The artistic creation Vittorio Lo Cicero fulfils itself and celebrates its spreading all over the world, though remaining well far from the myths and the allegories, and lives its creative unconscious in the tonal density of the reality. In this way the artist asserts that in his painting the colour expresses the innate vitality and the preference for a pictorial image, where the painter’s origin remains inside as an important element that helps the artwork to develop and from which the chromatic aspect of each subject painted is gleaned from. He is of Sicilian origin (he was born in Syracuse in 1939), but he has been living in Bozen for more than fifty years now, where he has been a respected chief of the crime squad of the local police headquarters in the past and nowadays he is a popular painter. This is an important detail especially in order to clarify that painters are not made, but men are born with the advanced ability of discovering beauty: the harmonious tension that a visual operator finds out when he deeply links his soul, his sensory personality with the environment belonging to him and to the other. Therefore Lo Cicero’s paintings, such as Rosa con Bocciolo, is full of dynamic refinement where the main principle is this emotional potential, the charge, but the advanced poetic stimulus and the professionalism the artwork into a sublime state characterised by a celestial brightness. Hence, the colour becomes the fundamental value of his painting. It does not have a realistic drawing up, as someone could think, but a marvellous evoking beauty, which does not accept defined borders because it does not want at all the analogical creativity, which is pure bright essence, to be overshadowed. All the paintings of Lo Cicero fire themselves up on the palette in the constant attempt at escaping in an unquestionable distance from the reality, in order to translate this one into magic hyper-realism: this is the aesthetic fascination that characterises Lo Cicero’s painting. The pure unconscious liberation arises from the world origin itself. Moreover, in the pictorial expression it becomes conscious little by little while the practical creation of the art phenomenon occurs, almost as if the idea of the art was to take advantage of the new creative consciousness. This mysterious world that lives in Lo Cicero’s studio extends today its genetic heritage to the artistic collaboration of the twenty-eight years old daughter Tessandra, who contributes to the father’s work keeping the ardour and the pictorial vocation alive. Besides, in order to explain the additional note, it has to be said that in the whole huge artist’s work exists as a theoretical assumption the decomposition of what is ordinary in order to create the visual extraordinary of the timeless pictorial image, where you do not know the beginning, nor can you predict the destination, while the essence of the painting is biased towards the vagueness of time. It is a matter of a generalised philosophy, which turns into a particular pictorial creation due to its destiny of life and artistic trend. The art as an impartial expression of creative research cannot be mixed up with the reasoning and therefore it meets its exemplary style in the emotional explosion of the instinct. It is about that unknown unconscious that puts Lo Cicero in contact with the great artworks of famous painters and makes him keen on reproducing some of them to pay homage for instance to Van Gogh, De Chirico, Picasso, Manet and others, whilst not forgetting Tamara De Lempicka, the famous painter, whom Lo Cicero refers to in a sensory artistic recall, like for example in the artwork named Le Calle, which the Italian artist paints paying homage to her, or other ones painted with a style that is finely imitative. If nowadays Lo Cicero is a fulfilled artist is thanks not only to his intuitive faculties but also to his restless hardworking nature, which has led him to produce a collection of more than thousand artworks placed all over the world. In this he was also encouraged by the awards received in several international artistic expositions, from Europe till America and Australia. In addition, Lo Cicero’s 3 paintings are sought-after not randomly without any credit but thanks to his working method imposed by his oil painting technique: original colours on pure linen canvases whose creation requires about six months. This is the reason why the request for a painting of the artist needs a reservation with a long deadline. The technical effort for the creation of the artwork is indeed very laborious. Lo Cicero’s painting also persists with the antithesis of the social development and this means that, while our daily life tends towards violence always more, his painting goes actually towards the opposite direction and spreads the most resolute meaning of the beauty related to the figure in a better and better way and with an increasing artistic consciousness. This last additional consideration needed to be mentioned to fully present and describe the work of this artist, which does not paint just as a reaction to the push of the analogy, but in order to connect the instinct to the responsibility by representing a subject where the full development of light conquers the man’s calm. These are reflections that are apparently hidden in the common purpose of the generalised art. They are unfortunately necessary though and they need to be taken into account in order to give to the painter’s theme not just an occasional aesthetic appreciation but rather an introductory interpretation that allows to understand how the beauty is not a random and fortuitous product of the man’s mind but it is realised in the consciousness of the artist’s work. For this reason, what it has to be actually considered in the figurative arts is not just the representation of the painting and its nature. The observer instead must understand why and how the artwork has been developed in its so attractive originality, as it can happen today with Lo Cicero’s painting. His artistic production arises from very old roots and life experiences, which are definitely unusual. The painting of Lo Cicero becomes worthy of attention and consideration not just thanks to his Sicilian origins but also to his thought as a judicious man placed deep inside the human history.

Giuseppe Martucci 

During my twenty-year pictorial activity, I have showed my own artworks both in Italy and abroad in well known Art Galleries and I have taken part to several Art Exhibitions and Pictorial Festivals. Thanks to these facts, I was able to meet and get in touch with famous Art Critics, renowned Professors and Art Masters, editors, gallery owners, collectors, art lovers and men of culture. Thanks to the relationship with these people, I have learned precious teaching, especially the oil painting technique and the choice of the material that has to be used in order to ensure a perfect result and an optimum lifetime of the artwork. It is a matter of a deep research work and study and therefore an expressive way of colours tone representation. My activity manly requires patience and a good handicraft, because the creation of an oil painting lasts for a long time. I guarantee the proper SEVEN PICTORIAL STEPS, which a right painting needs: 1. Preparation of the background canvas 2. First surface treatment with zinc white 3. Second surface coat with titanium white 4. Third and last surface treatment with 50% of zinc white and 50% of titanium white 5. Drawing fixing procedure 6. Shades 7. Glazes 8. Final step and finishing touch In order to complete all this procedure, at least six months are needed. Regarding this technique, I created and developed a personal and almost exclusive method, but very similar to the one used in the past by the Great Artists, such as Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raffaello, Caravaggio, Van Gogh, and so on. It is about a very meticulous and specialised job that can last sometimes for more than the six months mentioned before (also depending on the dimensions of the canvas and the kind of subject represented) in order to realise a professionally made painting. The “Figurative”, which is expressed with dedication in my landscapes, portraits, floral subjects and so on, has been very appreciated and it has caused the birth of a particular liking and a feeling of true pictorial affection for my work. The Art reviewers have exalted the care of the details, the quivering strength of the colour, the brush work , the drawing, the vitality, the bright magic, the lyricism and the melody of the painting itself. The advanced poetic stimulus and the professionalism raise the artwork to a dynamic refinement and a sublime state characterised by a celestial brightness. The demand for my paintings is not fortuitous but it arises from my careful working methodology, from the firm mutual trust between the art amateurs, the use of genuine material and my particular bent and strong passion for painting and art in general. I would like to emphasize that I make use only of authentic and natural colours and of pure linen canvases. I do not use any drying agent or any chemical substance in order to shorten the time required for the desiccation of the colour. On the contrary, I give to each colour its right time for the natural absorption on the canvas. I devote myself with particular care to the brush work, the shades and the glaze, the last coating. Finally, the painting is furnished with the Certification of Authenticity and Guarantee, as provided for by the law nr. 1062 of 20th November 1971.