In the sign of color, the art of Gentile Polo met the well-known professor from Trento Elisabetta Doniselli.
Master’s Degree in Modern Literature at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in 1983, 34-year teacher in History of Art of the Giovanni Prati Classical High School of Trento (Italy), Elisabetta Doniselli has always been engaged in museum inventory, training of tourist guides and museum educational operators, in post-graduate courses for local operators, updates for tourist guides, organization of artistic events, presentation of catalogs for art exhibitions, is also a member of ANISA (National Association of Teachers of Art History) and FAI (Italian Environment Fund).
In meeting the works and technique of the artist Gentile Polo he left his esteemed critical comment which we wish to report in full below (photo: Gentile Polo):
“Art runs through the time in which it lives and with which it lives and feeds, it seems to capture the rhythm of existence itself and the salient aspects of the time and places experienced by the artist.
In this sense Gentile Polo crosses times and places, near or exotic with the same care for things, situations and people. His ancient passion for drawing and painting already cultivated on school desks, shines through the extensive production of the past three years. What does it emerge from? Passion emerges from the engaging way in which it tells stories, engaging because it animates the scene with a lively and mobile sign, both in b / w and in color. An apparently naturalistic sign and color.
In his artistic training Polo has reflected on that phase of the history of painting between post-impressionism and divisionism, a transition to the contemporary in which color inherits from the scientific culture of the time, the luministic energy in the decomposition, in dividing into single commas, segments , touches of primary colors (see the work of the divisionists such as Segantini, Previati, Pelizza, later on in the futurists) which then flow into the retina in the visual act in a single vibrant chromatic effect, intense like sunlight en plein air, therefore natural.
(In the photo: “The apple picker” by Gentile Polo, 2012)
It must be said that often the white support emerges, it is visible between one brush stroke and another, contributing significantly to speeding up the sense of light. Painting, however, before this turn of the late 1800s, used the nuance, the chiaroscuro effect, that taught by the academic tradition. The support is not a simple technical data, it is a white primer of a certain thickness, in which the preparation consists of a series of light, minute grooves, an underground texture on which the brush stroke plays with uninterrupted mobility.
But the overall effect that is created is independent of the subject: it can move for example in a wave, on a figure or on a background, to guide the gaze, to guide it towards the fulcrum of meaning, of communication. Here then, the isolation of the subject from what is around, the emphasis from the setting. In fact, for the concept it carries, for its profound sense, what has been deposited in the artist’s memory, as a naked ethical value, bypassing that formal envelope, set up around it, applies.
This peculiarity is a fundamental factor of Gentile Polo’s work as the title of the exhibition explains in the sign of color: each subject takes strength from the luministic quality but also from the cut of the layout.
(In the photo: “Loyalty” by Gentile Polo, ink and watercolor on paper – 2013)
The selected topic is usually isolated in the drawings and in black and white in general, on deserted horizons; in fact, he rarely immerses the themes in detailed settings (subjects with animals dogs on the sidewalk, horses, chickens, Ethiopian cows), indeed he organizes light textures, almost the correspondent of the aquatint. Even in the case of western and exotic stories and people (beaches and bathers of Ancona, sitting under the sun, Alpine metaphor, sketch of Allegory of freedom) this choice returns: points to situations that are generally static, and dwells on them, leaves ensnare from those long times, almost in contemplation, especially of African atmospheres.
(In the photo: “Allegory of freedom” by Gentile Polo, watercolor 2013)
In recent works – for example, Consciences in comparison, Allegory of freedom both from 2013 as others -, the background and the foreground are punctuated by a chromatic, deliberately anti-naturalistic chessboard that frames the theme. It is clear that in this way the cutting took place, the detachment from the descriptive complacency of the setting. It is a question here of grasping the choice made by Polo.
(In the photo: “Consciences in comparison” by Gentile Polo, watercolor, 2013)
Often the effect of travel consists in the development of a profound pietas towards the various humanity encountered, not translatable with the current word piety, but with the Latin term indicating respect towards one’s neighbor, towards religious sentiment: in the case of African themes in fact, there is no curiosity for the ethnic datum, deliberately not described by the brush stroke. Volumes of figures, alongside pets, stories suspended awaiting who knows what precarious-heroic-dramatic developments, as in Africa (2012).
The same finding moved and changes in issues that speak of his volunteering in humanitarian projects such as friendship and indifference, child labor, automatic washing in Dubbo.
(In the photo: “Friendship and indifference” by Gentile Polo, watercolor 2012)
In graphics, expressiveness takes a different path, inserting color fields of immediate communicative effect: this is the case of Yellow … (2013) in which, next to a fragment of working life fixed by the ink – pagination from a photographic reportage -, the intensity of color contains a story: a monochromatic flash returns a wide range of both emotional and sensory suggestions, above all sonic and olfactory.
Similar solution in Loneliness in poverty, in which the black band cancels the horizon and erasing the context, speaks unequivocally to the observer of the drama of loneliness and marginalization; the black band thickens the sense of the work on the curled up and twisted figure in the newspapers scattered on the ground. Together with the watercolor ink above it evokes an existential dimension without appeal: here the formal outcome and the iconographic one seem perfectly interpenetrated. Clochard returns to the subject, isolated in this case by the sparse geometric lines of the background, this time empty backgrounds.
(In the photo: “Ethiopian cows” by Gentile Polo, ink on paper, 2013)
Humble themes, simple still lifes, such as the object of the harvest – something that tastes of earth, humus, both the cob, the bark -, that the accessories of the houses – Fireplaces – or even remains of the passage of man – scrap metal – or like the many domestic animals that live in his depictions, inseparable from the sphere of daily toil, wherever you try it.
Consequence of these thematic choices, often intertwined with the ethics of his humanitarian commitment, are the few landscapes, against which the charm and admiration of nature prevails as well as the perennial play of reflections on the water.
(Elisabetta Doniselli, Stenico, 21 June 2013)
(In the photo: “Lights from the water” by Gentile Polo, watercolor 2013)