Profile Information
- Website
- http://www.igor.gustini.net
- College / University
- Accademia di Belle Arti, Venice - Italy
- Program
- Painting - assemblage
- Graduation
- 20 June 1993
- Member type
- Artist
- If you're an artist, what kind of art do you make?
- Digital, Painting
- I am...
- Born in Florence on 1969, he obtains the General Certificate of Education at the State College of Arts in Padua in 1987, and graduates from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice (Course of Painting) in 1993. Member of the Artist Union of Croatia (HDLU).
I live berween Italy and Croatia.
- About my artwork
- Igor Gustini attracted the attention of the public and critics several years ago with his textile collages, which he creates from discarded and found “rags” of various colors (frequently discarded painting rags from his colleagues, which imparts significance to the concepts of “chance spots” and “the continuity of events”). The effect of the regularly geometrically “tailored” “textiles,” glued to the canvas according to a reasoned visual system (but also according to a rational spatial system, because textile is “wrinkled” and thereby “spatial”), creates a coloristic effect nearly identical to that of the geometrically painted surfaces that are well-known to us from works of geometric abstraction. Here, nonetheless, in addition to the spatial-haptic effect of the collage –which is textile, with the characteristic category of the texture of the material and the structure of its surface, these works by Igor Gustini, in addition to their optical quality, have a marked quality, acting with their visual but also spatial –temporal dimensions.
That which at first glance captures attention is the strictly organized visual order, based upon the masterful and disciplined relations of colors, in the classically balanced composition and the organized dynamic relations within the frame of the picture. These are experiences which draw their roots from the great styles of 20th century modern art –from geometric and lyrical abstraction. Gustini, however, adds the informel experience of gesture here, that occurs with the final painting with oils (sometimes with a brush and sometimes dripping), while the collage, although in today’s art it is not new, functions here as a medium of constant exploration of the relations of the pictorial and the tactile; the structural and the material; the actual and the illusionary. The author constantly activates them here, via nearly all our sensors, an entire series of additional associations and visual-emotional events, because a collage can give everything an amazing two-dimensionality: touchable and untouchable; actual and unreal; spatially determined and that which has “shifted”; temporally close and indeterminate. Most often the daily and banal are transformed into the new and miraculous in a new harmony. In Gustini’s textile collages, this is particularly evident. Reality here is continuously “imploded,” so that reality, although tangible, is constantly transformed into abstraction –but geometrically coded and disciplined. In addition, there is also color, which ostensibly has absolute freedom (but also its added independent life as matter and as a textile material), placed under the control of the author, because Gustini perceives the space of
the picture from various vantage points. However, he then mutually harmonizes and disciplines them, providing a “geometric code” as a manner of access and a key to reading the works. Leading us thus to his perception based upon analytical observation, systematized within the solid, purified structure of the compositional raster –but also through which a dynamic situation of a tense relationship between the visual and haptic, between illusion and touch weaves simultaneously.
Collage —that enchanting “painting with scissors” (as Matisse called it), has long fascinated artists. It seems like play –and requires great concentration.
The collages of Igor Gustini with the help of snippets taken from known realities –taken from found material (or discarded material), create a new reality. Moreover, he shows particular interest in the architecture of the painting, always building a solid geometric structure and solid composition, while at the same time delicately imposing the duality of balanced simplicity and concentrated expressivity as the basic impression.
V. Slavica Gabout, 2008
- Artists I like
- Alberto Burri, Mario Merz, Robert Rauschenberg, Marca-Relly, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Anselm Kiefer, Andreas Gursky, Damien Hirst, James Brown...
- The centre of the artworld is
- New York, London, Beijing, online, another city
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I was looking at artist who have been influenced by artists in common - and came across your profile. I love your use of texture, depth, and dimension - not to mention passion. I am working on some collage pieces myself right now and love the geometric work - but I am very taken by your free form - something hard for me - but seems to be quite natural for you.
Hope we can stay in touch. So glad I came across your work! It's been very enjoyable and stimulating.
Rosemary