Vanni Viviani (San Giacomo delle Segnate 1937-2002) departed from our midst just a few months ago.
This paper is an affectionate remembrance of one of the most significant artists of the late 20th century, an Italian painter who has left a considerable cultural and creative void behind, in Milan.
The artist passed away just while a personal exhibition of his was being held at the Palazzo Tè in Mantova - a journey through a “new image” and “new figuration”, but also through that surreal, fantastic world he was true to.

Ten years after the exhibition on “The New Figuration” held in Florence in 1963, Vanni Viviani, by then a mature artist and expert in depicting the fantastic, participated, with the mystery of his authenticity, in “Presences and trends in young Italian art” (1974) - one of the most critically relevant events, organized by the Biennale of Milan and held in Palazzo della Permanente. In his work he made use of symbols, the poetic representation of analogies and metaphors, symbols that poets such as Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud, the so-called poètes maudits, used during the mid-19th century. Not without reason his early works were marked by the use and abuse of wheat, produced by his land, his Padania. Wheat was a symbol of life and prosperity while the apple celebrated sin, transgression, ambiguity and nature.

For Viviani, painting became, rather it had become, a mythical and ritual model, even involving the use of words such as “Love”, where the O was replaced by the apple itself or became a mirror of the name Vanni Viviani. He firmly believed even in his name, which contained the word “vivi” [live], because Vanni was a “visual” painter, a visionary who merged signs, images and allegories. In his paintings imagination explored the world, the original places and the Promised Land.

The cities, the heart of life with their architecture, ranged from the city of Brasilia to Cà di Pomm, and the Cenacolo cristiano. His are hyper-images, not real pictures nor images that refer to real objects, but hyper-images, as they are rather a hallucinated dilation of the image. His reproductions in the spirit of symbolic gigantism and his interpretations are a total simulation of widespread simulation – they are pure symbolization. Architecture, both private and public, ranges from San Paolo in Brazil to the farmhouse in San Giacomo delle Segnate, in the Mantuan district – his choice home. Vanni Viviani restored painting its virginity, the archaeological finish that suited the slow rhythm of a timeless action, removing it from the dust of daily life. The apple was a simulacrum, if by simulacrum we mean a demoniac image, the cause of sin, a biblical temptation, but also a symbol of powerful lust, that played physically and descriptively in labyrinths, architectural works, solids, rooms and landscapes at large. Colour and light, space and magic, love and indifference, everything led to the great skill of Vanni Viviani’s art. He was an artist of historical importance, who expressed his art in the ancient signs of the world and in the depth of affection that Mother Earth has today deprived us of. (traslated by Interpres)