Biography of Gino Conti – Painter & Artist – Gino Conti

Gino Conti

My name is Marzio Conti, and I am a musician, orchestra conductor and former flute soloist. Along with a vast collection of my father’s paintings, I inherited from him something fundamental: the love of beauty.

My father showed it to me every day in his beloved Florence back in the 1960s, often as we traveled together through the hills of Tuscany on his Vespa. He told me stories about his childhood during the Fascist regime, while the Second World War was raging, or when Florence was liberated. He pointed out the sight of an old farmhouse or a cypress grove or a picturesque view of Florence.

My father was self-taught in the true sense of the word. If you look at one of his last paintings, rich in an almost photographic perfection, it would be hard to imagine that a former worker at a scientific instrument maker could have reached such a high artistic standard by following his instincts, his sensibility and his aesthetic capacity.

Gino Conti was born on Oct. 17, 1929, in Piazza Dalmazia amid Florence’s working class Rifredi neighborhood, located in what was then the industrial side of the city. His father, Giulio, was a tiny, animated man with a pointy nose and reckless nature who loved traveling on his only valuable possession — a second-hand Bianchi motorcycle similar to the one seen in the movie “Amarcord” by Federico Fellini. He loved his motorbike, hunting and women — a side of his character his wife Nunziatina learned to accept on the first day of their marriage. She had renounced the love of her life to marry this ne’er-do-well for reasons which have never been clear to me.

Despite his disposition, my grandfather Giulio possessed one noble quality: he was a declared anti-Fascist who refused to join the party even for expediency. Without a membership card, it was almost impossible to find a job during the Fascist period. He survived due to a very brave and honest man known as Sor Lapi, the owner of a woodworking shop in Piazza Dalmazia, who hired my grandfather as a porter at great risk.

During the war, my grandfather and my father – a teenager at the time – helped partisans and Jewish families hide from Fascist patrols. My father told me one story only very late in life, evidence that it was a particularly difficult memory to dredge up. The night before Florence was finally liberated from the Nazis, the city was divided by the Arno River: the partisans held the part to the south and the German army held the part to the north. During the night, the Germans blew up all the bridges of Florence with the exception of the Ponte Vecchio, due to the deep respect the local art-loving army general had for it.

The same night, the SS troops rounded up all the man from Piazza Dalmazia, including my father and grandfather, who were suddenly awakened and taken away to dig their own graves. They were told that they would be executed and buried there the next day. Luckily, fate was with them that night: the SS troops departed Florence overnight, leaving the prisoners awaiting execution in the hands of the Wehrmacht, the regular army. All the women from Piazza Dalmazia, including my grandmother Nunziatina — a tiny illiterate woman originally from the countryside around Mugello – marched to the German headquarters, bringing flowers to the colonel there. Moved by pity and aware that the liberation of Florence was near, he freed all the prisoners at once, including Gino, the future artist.

At the beginning of 1950s my father got to know my mother, Maria Vittoria , a beautiful girl from Rifredi with wavy chestnut hair. She was five years younger. They met in a dance hall that my father frequented, for he shared the same passion for the fair sex that his father did. Apropos, I remember when my father used to encourage me to play music with the most convincing of arguments: “Study music, Marzio, so you will pick up a lot of women!” I did not study guitar as he suggested but the flute instead, and I did meet my wife through music, in the end.

My mother was fundamental to the artistic development of my father, although I believe his career as an artist represented more an opportunity to rise up from her humble origins rather than a true passion for culture. However, it was she who give him as a present his first oil painting kit before they even got married. They travelled on a Vespa along the Cote D’Azur for their honeymoon at the end of the 1950s – the same type of Vespa used in the movie “Roman Holiday” by Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn.

During those years my father grew confident in oil painting, armed with an easel for working en plein air. He joined the post-Macchiaioli movement that was popular in Florence at the time, especially among novice painters. In that period my father was still working at the Officine Galileo, the scientific instrument company, but, toward the end of the 1950s, he secured a position as a cartographer in a well-known firm.

I believe that job had a particular impact on his development as a painter. It is impossible not to notice the precision and purity of line and color in his paintings from the second half of the 1960s. The draughtsmanship required in his work as a map designer led him subconsciously to the hyperrealist “chiarista” — or luminous — phase that characterized his latter period. The most surprising thing about my father is the fact that he adhered to academic principles from the very beginning but always tried to develop artistic expression, despite his background as a factory worker, then office employee. He was truly self-taught.

His first important exhibitions date to collective shows in 1964, when he contributed figurative oil paintings. The turning point in his artistic search came in 1968 with his first solo show, at the Semaforo Gallery in Florence, a well-known venue for new talents. Here, Gino Conti entered a phase characterized by geometric representation of reality and a particular use of the chromatic scale, a simple, elemental style in which one can see his preference for a wide range of pastel colors. His debut won the support of art critics, which allowed him to exhibit his work in many Italian cities in the following years.

Another very important year was 1973, when Gino was invited to exhibit his paintings at the Polytechnic of Central London. Here the artist broke away completely from his figurative vision and began a new journey in more abstract themes about the relationship of time and space and experimenting with the use of new materials. In the years following this exhibition, my father increasingly devoted himself to this abstract vein, as well as proving his artistic skills in sculpture – working with marble and pietra serena, a gray sandstone often used in Renaissance Florence architecture – and in designing and fabricating unique pieces of jewelry. Gino continued to exhibit his paintings in numerous shows at home and abroad, including his first appearance at Galerie La Serrure in Paris, which would become his permanent home for new exhibitions in France.

The year 1979 represents the culmination of my father’s art: he abandoned the abstract themes and different materials and returned permanently to figurative painting, now displaying his new Chiarista hyperrealist style. Because of a strong allergy to the solvents used in the preparation of oil colors that he developed in later years, Gino began to re-create the same colors and warmth of his first artistic period with acrylic paints. He reproduced the constant presence of light in his paintings through a meticulous use of glazes, a result normally difficult to achieve with acrylic painting techniques. It was a new way of painting, in which Tuscan landscapes predominated and were represented through rarefied images – objects fading in a light dominated by silence and evanescence.

Today, Gino’s works can be found in museums, private collections and public institutions in Italy, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia and the United States. My father received prizes, reviews from important publications and attention from major broadcasters like the RAI of Italy, the BBC and others.

Such is the artistic curriculum vitae of my father.

An uncomplicated autodidact who produced much of his artistic output in a small but wonderful rooftop studio in Florence’s Piazzo Duomo, where in the breezy and clear days of May it seemed like Giotto’s bell tower might fall on your head.

He was a true Florentine, a man in love with his city whose life was never easy life but who had as an anchor my mother, who helped him carve out an artistic space. Unfortunately, Maria Vittoria suffered a stroke at an early age, an event that permanently changed the life of my family and, in particular, my father’s as an artist. Indeed, the last twelve years of his life were deeply marked by this tragedy and one can see an enervated quality in his last period.

My father died on May 3,1996, at 67. He left me with a legacy of paintings made of light and silence, through which I can relive our life together so vividly that today I can still smell the scent of the studio of those years gone by.

Translation by:
Daniel J.Wakin e Duccio Conti