Sotto un cielo nero (2015) Printmaking by Roberto Viesi

Roberto Viesi was born in Chiari (Bs) in 1953.
After obtaining his artistic maturity in 1971, he began working as an illustrator and cartoonist for well-known Italian publishing houses.
At the same time, he undertook an artistic study with oils and ink drawings; the ironic or satirical vein that fuels his comic strip stories can also be glimpsed in several of these works in which fat prelates sleep peacefully in the half-light of stylized pulpits or grant quick blessings to poor fishermen in exchange for freshly caught fish.
In the 1980 he obtained a diploma in advertising graphic design at the Scuola degli Artefici in Brera, in Milan. The graphic activity in the following decades almost completely occupied Viesi's time and creativity. In 2010 he published "Francesco and the Wolf", a comic book for children; the following year "The earth does not turn, you beasts!" always in comics, dedicated to Giovanni Paneroni amateur astronomer from Lombardy. Since 2011 he has published the comic strip "Ürgòt, the last of the ancient Camuni" in the Giornale della Valcamonica.
In recent years he has undertaken a study that leads him to create new graphics with a mixed technique that includes manual drawing with pens and pencils , subsequent scanning, insertion and PC processing of the colour, manual finishing of each of the digitally printed specimens in small runs, with acrylic, enamels and pastels. These recent works summarize some of Viesi's professional experiences: the illustrated story, the chromatic sensitivity, the graphic synthesis with which he tends to simplify figures and natural elements, the balance required and expressed in the creation of a symbol, a logo.< br />Reality and myth face each other and merge, as well as religiosity, superstition, ancient beliefs. The figurative translates into icon and graphic code. The partly unconscious creative path of the author leads him to seek/return to a "childish" vision of environments, living beings of various and indefinite nature and to re-charge them with that magic and mystery that often during our path towards adulthood fade, replaced by a utilitarian valorisation, when not trivialized or filtered by cynicism and mistrust. In any case, the contents are deliberately, and almost always, used in a gregarious function, aimed at the primary pleasure of composing small concerts of lines, curves, hatches, on textures with soft shades that blend imperceptibly. Thus they could be abstract drawings, but the author does not want to definitively give up the possibility of suggesting some recognizable icons and of letting the viewer "enter" into the scene represented, also leaving him the freedom to poetically personalize them with his own sensitivity and his deepest experiences.

• Nationality: ITALY
• Date of birth : 1953
• Artistic domains:
• Groups: Contemporary Italian Artists