Review
MARKS LOOKING FOR LIGHTS
“...these are landscapes with a taste of a gaelic ballad, damp plains, remote ponds and moors, misty skies, where water, ground and sky mix up together, in a unique silent, mysterious and “philosophical” nature.”
So, in some of the latest watercolour artworks, his childhood locations seems to be filtered by space and time, in a dremy dimension, such as in “La piana / The plain” (2013), where the water turns – passing by a dreamlike thick stripe of blurry vegetation – in a foggy sky, or in “Luci autunnali / Autumnal lights” (2010), for example, a landscape with dark brown/grey and grey/blue shades, river’s and fogs’ lights that come from the wetty plain up to a high sky.
In the end, “Notturno / Night” is a bold composition made with a mixed technique, where the entire painting is occupied by a completely clear plot of land which appears as a perfect abstract artwork.
Luigi Meregalli uses very sophisticated and refined techniques, but they’re never shown off. We can also understand that, in the obsession of the noises and the stunning screams, he goes looking for these places, which are those of his childhood and even a little of our: mankind’s childhood places.
Renzo Francescotti - 2015
SILENT AND DEEP DISQUIETUDES OF LUIGI MEREGALLI
Dreamlike visions of a surreal world, intangible, diaphanous memory of a living and flourishing nature, always inspiring artists and poets...
Luigi Meregalli has always been involved in a complicated and patient artistic research that has found in the watercolour technique the ideal means of expressivity; his latest artworks are intense, full of pathos and with a thick and heart breaking melancholy for the colours and the heal of life.
A painting technique that has been inspected for a long time also by the great masters of the past, really complicated and often ungrateful or, as the artist himself likes to highlight, watercolour is a real discipline, that leaves nothing to chance, but everything allows those that with perseverance and dedication investigates for many years its time and secrets.
Only a continuous and enthusiastic research, easy and seductive flattery-resistant, always curious and open to new, original and unexpected technical solutions, today guarantees Meregalli effective tools to recover the ancient art transforming it in a dry language of contemporaneity.
Weak beloved countryside’s and sweet native Lombard locations’ mnemonic traces, or the intimate and secret poetry of glimpses of the Garda lake and Venice, are projected in a dreamlike and alienating dimension, where every real fact is patiently reported, but almost magically sublimated.
every reference dissolves, details and outlines come together and confuse themselves in the elegant, unforgettable visions created by the artist and the relentless fog of the oblivion that everything envelopes suspending everything in space and time.
Nature’s colours and shades turn into moving, sensitive, emotional vibrations which open to the observer, without any secret, the intimate feeling of the restless painter.
A really rare and surprising technical mastery, result of daily patient experimentation, allows Meregalli to combine the immediacy of the creative act, particular of the painting technique chosen by the artist, with the ability of blending colours and atmospheres, joking with light to make places and memories become untouchable, playing dangerously at the same time with water to catch and control the air.
This is how the recent, fascinating and with a vague taste of minimalism artworks of Luigi Meregalli are born, lacking of any human presence, but ideal and silent scenic design for the intense, unanimous and desperate humanity’s chant, today always more lonely and shaken, eager of certainty and peace.
Nicoletta Tamanini, july 2012
LUIGI MEREGALLI
It’s in the water’s nature to flow, to slip untouchable and impossible to circumscribe. And when, finally, it stands still, water changes showing its emptiness and vagueness to the eye. For such a behaviour and status pheraps it’s seen as the cradle of life, the way to achieve purification and a centre of regeneration. When the water meets the color, the alliance is as hardest as it could ever be. Few can manage and follow water’s temper and fully understand its faint frontiers, indistincted as they are with the whole horizon. Luigi Meregalli is a watercolour master. His landscapes and shapes take form from the soft brush’s sediments on the paper. Landscapes and shapes lose their physical firmness, to almost became unreal. They are life’s settings seized from the mind well before the eye, and by the mind filtered till they became the works that, one day after the other, take shape from the artist’s strokes. Every work is a unique breath of life, in which light is a valuable aid. Bystander is placed facing but also living inside the work. And the work is an eyes wide open dream. Water can melt every border, makes it pervious. It’s allowed to get in the work and what’s inside it can easily get out. Everything is played on a stage that allows imagination to take place as the same time with factual reality. It is a tough technique to master, but Luigi Meregalli proves to be at home with it, taking us to a trip through ever changing worlds. Nowadays he performs gentle forays into the world of acrylic, using strong and emotional landscapes to achieve and fullfill his works.
Fiorenzo Degasperi - Riva del Garda december 2006
A LOOK BEYOND THE HORIZON
THE CREATIVE POETICS OF LUIGI MEREGALLI
In the silent-wrapped paints of Luigi Meregalli everything seems to be still, stopped in an eternal moment by a sensitive hand. However, the look slowly runs along the brush strokes’ rail that wraps and marks the irrepressibly time passing, which consumes that instant and multiplies it "ad libitum", as if it was an highly imaginative musical score, where dense and deeply engaging colouristic notations take place of the sheet music.
Everything, in the artworks of this artist, becomes poetry by image; poetry that speaks through colours that are composing variously in front of the pleasantly fascinated observer's gaze.
Luigi Meregalli’s poetic represent solid reality with its organic style, creating a rhythmic weaving using nature’s colours and season’s changings, generating compelling colloquial compositions instead of using extreme colours in twine just to bring simply visual effects.
The leitmotif of the poetry that puts the “look beyond the horizon", borrowing the title of a master’s artwork, is given in the works made with acrylic paints as well as with the watercolor technique, by the stroke clearness and from imaginative plasticity, both in perspective and, above all, in argumentative choice levels.
In other words, you can understand that “beyond”, that works as an ideal “mark” for both our and the artist’s introspective dimension, where the look lose itself.
So, it’s really worth getting lost, and then found, in Luigi Meregalli’s art, letting ourselves being pleasantly enchanted by his original atmospheres.
Simone Fappani - Cremona september 2006
PAINTED POETRY
With an immediate and irresistible power, Luigi Meregalli’s work is able to contact the observer: as a poem where the wise signs, as allusive words, reveal atmospheres, thoughts, moods. We don’t find in the works only a nostalgic lyricism, that sometimes seems the only tone, people ascribe to the watercolour. There’re, in Meregalli’s painting, outstanding, suspending atmospheres and slight instants, those seem to dissolve every clot of concreteness. There’re the peaceful beauty too, in bright landscapes and open skies or in secret foreshortenings and corners, those tell about moments of melancholy. But other works (especially the most recent ones) strike us with a dramatic strenght, with a sense of oppression, that shows through views of suburbs or trees, those burn and lighten towards anguished skies. This evolution doesn’t appear in a more expert technic (it always has been refined), but in the inquiry about a new, true and more dramatic way to communicate. New colours, reinterpreted signs tell us about a restless soul, an uninterrupted testing of unusual methods, original codes to construct a deep dialogue: as the artist wants to tell us his emotion looking at what he has seen, not to describe it. To express more than to display.
Giancarla Tognoni - Riva del Garda 2005
LA THE WEAVING OF A PRECIOUS LACE
Luigi Meregalli has travelled throughout all watercolour fields and has uncovered a heart capable of perceiving all the nuances which stem from the blending of water and colour, transparency and reflection. Meregalli can be said to have explored every path watercolours can lead to. Watercolours have told the artist all their secrets and potentials. He has experienced the mist of the plain of Lombardy and the warmth of the verdant Garda Lake. He has walked the narrow streets and wards of Venice and has always searched for the poetic and evocative nature of all these places. Meregalli has woven a thick weft resembling a precious lace made of images and of what his colours weave, invent and re-create. Our eyes perceive a new world to discover with the artist’s same astonishment and wonder because his paintings invite us to enter a visual suggestion which expands into emotions and becomes history. Luigi Meregalli has enriched the spectrum of his colour nuances and has extended the perimeter of the painting to the meanders of liquidity. He has laid stress on the image depth, thus achieving seductive results and is now ready to set off for a new creative journey into his "visual Poetry".
Mario Cossali – Arco - 2002
Meregalli’s works, beside their figurative approach, do not merely dwell upon descriptions. Evoking and informal poetry is the result of the artist’s mastery of his watercolours.
Giorgio Seveso – Vicenza - 1999
THE SHARP DESIRE TO PERCEIVE
Luigi Meregalli takes us by the hand and leads us into a world made of tangled bushes and trees, clear waters, paths across the country. Every Meregalli’s work is a journey into a friendly and serene nature moulded by the man. Contrary to what may happen in a city or in a forest, getting lost in this nature is almost impossible. “Losing oneself in a city the same as in a forest is hard to learn since the names of the streets need to sound as the creaking of dead wood to the wanderer’s ear and the inner lanes need to clearly beat the time of the hours passing by just as gorges do.” Walter Benjamin, in “infanzia berlinese”. Even though the destination is unknown, the artist offers the certainty of a safe journey thanks to the encouraging and gentle atmosphere of the landscapes. The public walks at a light step staring widely and deeply and breathes the air of the heart of life. These gently modelled landscapes arouse questions and subtle uneasiness, yet they do not cause anxiety. They just spur the sharp desire to perceive. It took Meregalli long years and patience to create this poetic world and to refine his knowledge of watercolouring.
Mario Cossali - Malcesine 1996
…Meregalli is really a watercolourist of ancient touch, his expressive key is borrowed from far readings. His touch is absorbed and impressive where the colour should remain impressed on the surface, while it’s unstrained and pale where the atmospherical background suggests to enlarge the tone-masses. Meregalli knows his figurative role very well and he moves away from its borders toward a shrewd abstraction.
Donato Conenna – Arona - 1995
…Luigi Meregalli is in love with nature and his lyrical images unwind on the soft notes of watercolours. The country is lived from the depth with a gentle and romantic soul in a lyric dimension. The technique is very fine and its shades and marblings are fresh also in the most difficult backlights and in some chromatic efflorescences. Everything becomes tenderly sentimental: melancholy is really the effusion of a dreaming and crepuscular soul.
Paolo Rizzi – Venezia - 1994
…nature is narrated with the trembling and elegant touch of watercolours through quiet assonances and sweet colour’s vibrations. Luigi Meregalli turns landscape-views into pale outlines that change their chromatic aspect according to the atmospheric light. Tonalities wind on the paper and spread in a multitude of shades, dimming images and dissolving their structure. The most restless soul calms down in these paintings; the sensation of tranquillity and peace shrouds everything.
Gabella Niero - Udine - 1994
…Luigi Meregalli is an artist who has found the starting point for a research of the emotional dimension in nature, its rhythms and its colours. He usually paints with watercolours and he’s able to dominate this technique with skill, obtaining communicative, tender and intangible results, similar to the atmospheres from which he takes inspiration.
Paolo Levi - Milano - 1992
…his painting is built and compact and it reveals a pure atmosphere balanced by search and achievement. Besides the natural references, Meregalli’s experience wants to build up nature, his inspirer, through an inner introspection and a search of essentials.
Claudio Turella -Torino –1987