My name is Davide Peretti. I was born in Bologna in 1967 and I live and work here.
Most of my family members are painters, including my father, three grand-uncles, an uncle and my grand-father, all of us are painters! Needless to say, I was born and grew up among canvases, paintbrushes, bucks, palettes and pigment tubes so that, naturally, even before I learned how to speak, I was holding a pencil and, almost absentmindedly, I first started to doodle and then to draw everything that came into my mind or that was around me.
The choice to become a painter, however, was not straightforward: once I graduated from high school I completed a degree in ‘painting restoration’ in an art academy in Florence. I worked as a painting restorer for several years in Bologna and in other cities.
Only ten years ago did I decide to set my restoration work aside in order to dedicate myself exclusively to my paintings (a choice which I’m very happy about).
For several years my father and I have organized drawing and painting courses open to all kinds of people, be they adults or children, who want to approach this ‘language’. During 1996-1997, we have taught drawing together in Bologna’s ‘town art collection’ within the framework of the ‘hand-pencil-museum’ project.
In order to educate and to improve my drawing, I attended the ‘Nude Class’ at the Bologna ‘Academy of Arts’ for several years.
I believe that every painter, before expressing himself originally and freely, has the obligation to study and to copy the artworks of the painters who lived before him, the great maestros, trying to learn and to acquire their technique, their secrets and comparing himself to them all the time. This is how I tried to work for several years and now I finally manage to find a pictorial manner which I consider to be absolutely personal, trying to connect the figurative pictorial tradition with a matter research of informal style.
The canvases, or better the wooden panels on which I paint originate from the real world, from all that surrounds me and that my eyes see and perceive. However, through the framing, the colour, and the pictorial matter, I try to find appoint of equilibrium between a recognizable shape and a ‘non-shape’ in which matter, sometimes stratified with a battledore or a paintbrush, sometimes spread in liquid airframes and turned into colour, becomes the unique protagonist, alongside the subject of the painting. In this way, I paint, bodies, portraits, landscapes and still life, trying to find a point of contact, a common factor which can adjoin and bind them, at the same time making them something different, something else.
A similar argument can be applied to drawings and watercolours, where, since it is not possible to work with a stratified matter, my attention is focused on the choice of the charcoal trace and the colour blotch to expand themselves beyond the contours of the represented shape.
As far as decorations are concerned, my attitude is a lot more playful: I have fun designing and executing decorative paintings whose aim is to furnish, to adorn and, sometimes, to modify indoor or outdoor architectonical areas. They range from an accentuated naturalism, with the intent to ‘trick the eye’ (Trompe l’oeil), to other stylistic codes and stylisations of different types.
contact: tel. +39 051 307905 - e-mail davide@davideperetti.it
copyright © Davide Peretti 2008
