Ottorino De Lucchi
(Italian, born 1951)
With a degree in Chemistry and Pharmacy, Ottorino De Lucchi’s prestigious career as a university professor and researcher stands out above all in the brief notes of his biography. There is no conflict between his work and his art: the history of science is continually underlining the scientists’ sense of amazement and marvel, and every new scientific discovery brings intense beauty to light; creativity is an essential gift in art just as it is in science. His experience as a chemist produces not only his ability to observe nature with serenity and tranquility, but his way of approaching it. The scientific method, which requires extraction of the pertinent information from a great mass of data, leaving out all the rest, is applied by Ottorino to his painting too. His baskets of fruit, his unusual vases with their delicate flowers, his portraits and gentle landscapes appear to be isolated from the world around them, standing out against a uniform background which is almost always black or very dark, while light flows through them and draws their profile with a very bright outline. His composition is linear, made up of a very few elements, an expression of modernity far from the complicated opulence of the Baroque; this is a specific choice, just as his intent is precise: a single object attracts our attention, and its immediate recognizability makes it a perfect portrait, revealing his intimate beauty. This result cannot be achieved without hard work: the perfection that is apparent in Ottorino’s paintings comes from the talent and many years of dedicated work. Every painting has its own touching simplicity and whispered meditation. The things he portrays rise to the status of monuments in their ordinariness; their silent dignity and humility take us into the atmosphere of a cathedral.
We can identify a number of keywords in De Lucchi’s art that are an essential part of his way of painting: simplicity; precision; conciseness; consistency. These are no matter of chance, for they reflect Ottorino’s very way of living. Another important item of information emerges from De Lucchi’s biography: he came to know the works of Andrew Wyeth and love his drybrush technique when he was in the US. His scientific spirit drove Ottorino to conduct a long series of experiments based on a simple intuition, coming up with a technique which is based on a similar underlying idea but entirely original in terms of how it is executed. And while De Lucchi portrays day-to-day life like Wyeth, his subjects and the way he represents them are very different.
De Lucchi’s paintings, like Wyeth’s, present a subject, show it close up, but avoid any further references to other scenes in our memories, rejecting all forms of premeditated epiphany. But if the greatness of art depends on its ability to bring to mind more than one scene in a single work, Wyeth and De Lucchi’s work might be considered among the minor arts. De Lucchi’s art unintentionally catches us off guard, because it is not meant to be provocative; It focus our attention with its simplicity that unexpectedly surprises and seduces. We teeter on the brink of his paintings, asking ourselves what is so strange, so unusual and yet so familiar about them; we have a destabilizing sensation, because we see at the same time the normality and the immortality of the objects shown in his paintings. De Lucchi’s works make us feel at home; and the silence of his paintings nourishes the spirit, for days to come.
