First published: Winter 1999/2000
Carlo Zinelli (1916–74), is one of the most fascinating and complex personalities among the more important artists whose works reflect the ideas of l'art brut elaborated by Jean Dubuffet, those spontaneous and autonomous creations conceived without reference to models of artistic-visual culture and outside the commercial art world.
His work is unusual not only for its exceptional inventiveness and stylistic independence – seen in the paintings of figures, writings and signs made between 1957 and 1974,with their extraordinary variety of forms, colours and combinations – but also for the aesthetic and cultural components that form it, which would seem to contradict his modest origins and the circumstances in which his art developed.
It is an art that does not seem to derive from a conscious desire to represent but rather from the need to 'speak' through painting, giving life to an uninterrupted narrative which is simultaneously pictorial, linguistic, poetic and musical, its sources anthropological, socio-linguistic and cultural
This is an article extract; read the full article in Raw Vision #29
