Sailing in search of oneself and other voyages

Art rarely concedes its favours with the spontaneity of a natural act. When this happens, it is a special blessing: it flows up, fresh and forceful, from the depths, propelled only by its own youthful vitality. It is sufficient to detect the springs, and limit their initial dispersion, and its course will be assured. Those lucky individuals who are so blessed recognise it in a manner that I would define as physiological, and it is a source of welcome satisfaction to respond to this impulse which is set free, rather than breaks free, in the spontaneity of gestures that fix the frameworks of the signs, blend the plastic forms, and determine the flowering of colour. More often, art is something latent. It is a humour that circulates through the lymphatic system, pervading the tissues and tonifying them, but it is only manifested in sudden, intense drops. Finding the hidden vein, and turning it into a fountain to drink from, is a task which is at the same time both fearful and relaxing. Anybody who passes through this ordeal suffers from a sense of thirst which needs to be satisfied somehow. It is a vague, persistent stimulus, an eddy from the depths, which gives rise to restlessness, and leads one to search for the solution to truly intricate enigmas, and the answer to confusely formulated questions, in wordly situations and happenings.

The practical consequence of this tension is that one starts wandering through the boundless territories of culture, sailing aimlessly here and there, exploring homologated doctrines, canonic disciplines, and cognitive techniques, whose indications, albeit partial and at times misleading, are useful, however, to trace out the route to arrive at the archipelago of the possible projections of ann inner restlessness that is fervid and creative. Until finally one arrives on the predestinated island where the shipwreck, who has by now become a sailor, recognizes the place where the inner shadows fade away, turning into meaningful signs and forms, sounds and colours, words that return his image reflected in the numerous changing appearances of the world.

In the case of Giovanni Greppi, art is the outcome of his search for himself, wandering around in different, heteronomous enviroments of knowledge, making choices that are sometimes conventional, based on tradition or even just on parental expectations, or the need to acquire an adequate equipment to face life in society, and at other times vocational, albeit vague and in the end unsatisfactory, but all the same taken with a lively, enquiring curiosity and intelligence, in which it is not difficult to detect, a posteriori, the peculiar characteristics of a tendentially creative personality, which reveals itself in sporadic intense moments of painting during the course of his years of formation.

The decisive factor in Greppi’s eventual choice to dedicate his life to art was his meeting with Gianni Dova, as well as the latter’s readiness to share with the young, still immature, yet extremely sensitive and strongly motivated painter, eager to define his artistic vocation and to verify it by means of a comparison with a maestro whose vision he felt was vaguely similar, and who succeded in plucking the inner strings of a secret instrument that touched the recesses of the mind, arousing responses in the form of aesthetic emotions. The Dova that Greppi met by chance, and immediately fell in love with, was notvthat of the totem-like monsters, surrealistically conjured up by a dream dimension, and immersed in a kind of liquid spatiality with its crystal-clear reflections. It was rather the painter of Carantec and the wild Camargue, trying to discover the structure behind the reality of phenomena, in the form of water, land and vegetation mixed into a primitive material that the eyes of the painter saw through, and represented in broad compositions of fluid substance, which reveal flashes of light worthy of Monet in the “Nymphs”, with a range of colours that recall the symbolists of the school of Pont Aven, and through them, the exotic world of Japanese prints.

This factor represented by Dova was decisive in Greppi’s introduction to painting, that is to say, to that hidden, submerged aspect of his personality which was to reveal itself not as a haven of rest, a finally explicit sign of his vocation, but as the starting-point of a chain of visual events which were to complicate his cognition of reality, and at the same time, solve problems that arise in everyone’s mind, when faced with the mystery of creation.

Nicola Micieli