Italo Petreni is an artist who lives in the hills between Volterra and San Gimignano in the heart of Tuscany: a life-style choice that in his painting is translated into attention to detail, into the love with which he captures the vast panoramas of the rolling hills of green of the Sienese country. After youthful experimentation in informal fields of work, Italo Petreni has settled on a more figurative painting style, with naturalistic reproductions of Tuscan landscapes: with the specificity and variety of his work, he has reached the apex of his aesthetic research in the last ten years. The artist is seduced by the sun-soaked and fields, by the wood-covered hills of Chianti, by the moonscape atmospheres of the Sienese Crete, hills, and seems to give into the desire to dive into those fields of scented flowers that surround the isolated country villas, dispersed throughout the countryside. These landscapes painted in oil are born from Petreni’s familiarity with the technique of watercolour painting, capable of rendering with immediate elegance the direct impression that man creates upon seeing nature for the first time. In these works the inspiration of Renaissance landscapes is notable. They are harmonious, composed of a sort of magic equilibrium, with a composition that is ordered and rigorously planned out, representing hills divided by wide valleys, landscapes where the. eye is lead towards the infinite continuum of hills and sky. It is a painting style which, not exempt from post-Macchiaioli echoes, celebrates the rural environment across brilliant relationships between light and colour, imbuing the compositions with harmony by means of a certain lightness which emanates from the joining of complementary tones. It is in this way that his extraordinary representations of vast. flowered meadows and cultivated fields immersed in the summer heat take form, Italo Petreni’s landscapes never include the human form: in his paintings man is the spectator who is amazed by the painter’s game of agrestic nature, and the artifice of painting evokes in him hidden sentiments and bucolic sensations. Italo Petreni has participated in numerous collective exhibitions and various personal shows. His works are found in many public collections and innumerable private collections in Italy and abroad, demonstrating yet again the wide appeal of his works and the ample consensus of the public in his regard.
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