The material soul of Angelo Orazio Pregoni: the most refined of artistic traditions sweeps away the politically correct.

Pregoni has an irriverent personality as well as refined artistic abilities: we get to know the synesthetic artist better, through the skills of the historian Valeriano Venneri and the curator Maria Marchese.

      Written by Valeriano Venneri and Maria Marchese

The artist Angelo Orazio Pregoni enters the Italian and international art scene, with strong themes, both from an ideological point of view and in terms of painting technique: in his creations, in fact, there is not much room for political correctness and one can, clearly, ‘delve’ into the rediscovery and, therefore, the use of pigments, binder colours and canvas preparation layers that are no longer used in current times; with the Genoese artist, they rediscover a captivating vigour and original meaning. The artwork is complete: meticulous preparation of the canvas, the application of special glues, which tend to highlight or minimise certain details, the composition thought out and paused, and, finally, the frame, built, ‘ad hoc’, by Marco Ventura, adapts to the work of the artist, becoming an essential element and not just mere decoration.

This ‘appearance’ has the connotations of innovation as much as of tradition: we are talking about original, eclectic compositions, executed with traditional techniques, which bring him closer to the current of Mannerism, to name but a few, Rosso Fiorentino, Pontormo, or even Parmigianino. Indeed, he does not reject the contemporary: the creation of impressive and provocative installations place him in the current art scene. The break with standardised and repetitive canons occurs through a materiality, made up of sensations and emotions, which reach the viewer like a strong and penetrating perfume.

Pregoni fills the soul with matter in his art: matter miraculously becomes figure, colour, light, feeling, emotion… This passage of transformation or transfer, from a spiritual entity to a tangible, thick, recognisable matter, adorns his inner world, made up of contrasting reflections and deep feelings, in which banality has no place. Giving substance, life, personality to this soul, with eccentric and experimental pigments and forms becomes the highest and most attractive point of the artistic journey, undertaken by Pregoni.

The figures, the portraits, in Pregoni, have an important personality; for this reason, the human figure must be understood and interpreted, in its physical corporeity, but also in the exceptional spirituality that it emanates. The human being is understood, by the artist, as a subject to be represented with alacrity and meticulousness, which is why he chooses and paints real subjects, real people, models, who, with his decisive and decisive brush, can change and adapt to the message he wants to communicate. The pictorial element becomes an indissoluble union with matter, which is moulded and becomes form. Pregoni’s canvases are not caressed: matter becomes colour and substance, act and power, it bursts and breaks, with forms that are not precise and ideal. He enters into the reality he lives with the strength and firmness of his brushstrokes, which, from time to time, can take on the connotations of tragedy or human existence.

The form, in Pregoni, can have the connotation of a break with historicised stylistic canons of balance and beauty, of provocation and reflection, with respect to epochal events, which are decisively modifying society; the caricatured, deformed, elongated aspect thus becomes a witness to this transformation. The subjective observation of objective figures or elements, the ability to be able to adapt and even invent, starting from a real datum, creating an imaginary shape or figure, which however responds to Angelo Pregoni’s artistic needs.

The approach or creative process plays a decisive role in Pregoni’s work: he starts from a real datum and arrives at something imaginary or ideal.

Historical events, characters, mutations and social and cultural issues are dissected, with surgical and olfactory precision, by the nose, exactly the sensory organ of greatest importance to the artist. He looks, he studies, he discerns reality, and then he turns it into a work of poignant relevance, emphasising the aspect of the message it conveys, and, likewise, the compositional technique.

The concept of ‘syn aisthànestai’ (together perceiving) becomes a trait d’union, which sees an overlapping of multiple planes, which, in the author, is amplified to the umpteenth power: the intersection of these is unleashed with an uncommon complexity, the understanding of which requires careful analysis, as they contort, mutually, pacifying, in the end, when ecstasy is reached.

That irrepressible pleasure, it holds, within itself, all that has been spoken of so far.

How lightly and with what poor materials man constructs his excuses!

                Milan Kundera

Kundera slices a blade, which Angelo Orazio Pregoni plunges, deep into the dermis of the socio-cultural system, to call for a renewed choice, a more selective eyelash, in order to can annihilate those mediocre elements, on which, more and more often, man has drawn, from a certain point in history onwards, to formulate and erect a false ‘keystone’, which has given rise to a confused fragmentation: where, precisely, the purest sense of values has been lost, in order to be able to lavish justifications on all kinds of approximations, here is where society has placed false myths, fashioned with ‘fool’s gold’, on a pedestal. Thus, the Genoese artist thrusts his stral, straight into the flesh of a ‘superorganism’,  which has phagocytised the apology, called by Kundera, and, by now, reproduces itself by osmosis. Angelo Orazio Pregoni was born as a difference, at the moment in which he experiences himself as perfumer, author, artist… capturing, in fact, the essences, in the most tasty and intimate “chromatic” apexes, he ascribes the “verba”, where the pentagram becomes a ‘hexagram’: the sixth line is that intuitive, imaginary full, vivid, symbolic, evocative sixth sense… in which soul, mind, body/action, transubstantiated in aqueous humours, from tea, to wine, to urine, dense and honeyed fluids or fleeting and mild, as well as in the silky textures of a polychrome dust, the shattering of an ancient memory, make love. A “pragmatikòs” of excellence, Angelo Orazio Pregoni deconstructs the current “faux elle”, by plumping, on canvas, a venereal pictorial thought, in which full and fragrant signs sculpt the features of an irenic human plastic. The aesthetic act appears, while the hand exhausts its effort: beginning and end maintain the same emotional tension, from the first instant to the last, involving it in a sacred rituality of execution, which finally frees a virginity “sine civitate autem cum civitate nova”, whose exoticism coincides with being foreign to the stereotypical detritus.

Pregoni’s art reaches into the depths of those who look at it and contemplate it, because it ‘cleanses’ it of the refined dross of prevailing goodness, to show all its crude reality, made up of ideological aberrations that sometimes become death, pain and misery.

Paradoxically, the message can be positive, if we know how to read his Art, as there can be real redemption, if we can grasp the damaging contradictions of current human conduct.

Valeriano Venneri art historian and critic

Maria Marchese poet, art curator and critic