Riccardo Corti

 Although Riccardo Corti was born in Florence 74 years ago, he moved to Lido di Camaiore when he was 89. In recent years, he has exhibited mainly at and in collaboration with the Mercurio Gallery in Viareggio, and was a key figure in the contemporary painting scene, most of whose artists hail from Versilia. 

The path to his colourful pine trees and lemons was not exactly straightforward. Riccardo began his career in Rome in 1976 as an assistant to Luchino Visconti on the set of *The Innocence*. Three years later, he made his own film, *Miguelonica*; under the wing of his mother, with whom he shared a strong bond, he was increasingly drawn to painting, which remained his daily means of expression right to the end. This did not prevent him from delving into and exploring other fields, such as astrology, which was his great passion. 

In his unmistakable style, Corti paints slender, melancholic pine trees in oil, imaginative cross-sections of citrus fruits, sensual watermelons, picturesque seascapes in vibrant colours, and slender sticks floating in the void – the very ‘logo’ of his compositions: Everything stands out in an extremely atmospheric space, where the dynamic elegance of the forms blends with the softness of the colour nuances.

“I never depict the earth, but only that which emerges from it, in a kind of striving upwards, towards the supernatural,” Corti – who, amongst other things, is a passionate lover of astrology – has always emphasised in relation to his work. His painting is far more than mere imagery; it is lyrical and imbued with profound symbolic meaning, at once meticulous and inclined towards synthesis, within the framework of an aesthetic exploration that is never an end in itself. A quest for harmony that is also evident in the series of large-format portraits, created primarily between 2006 and 2018, in which Corti offers a sophisticated reinterpretation of the language of Pop Art: striking paintings in which a sense of realism is combined with a clear, inner poetic expression.

Riccardo battled cancer for a long time and once said, ‘When I die, I shall stand before the Lord – He will place all my sins on one side of the scales and set them against my thousand paintings and all the tender moments I have received from life and have also been able to give.’ He is already sorely missed by those who were fortunate enough to count themselves among his circle of friends; his paintings live on.