Mass of Stars
Black Hole - Eye of God
Revolving Motion
Dying Star
Milky Way
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Trebeski - Forte
The Via Crucis of Alberto Trebeschi
where the Word is Light of Hope
by
Bruno Forte
Archbishop of Chieti Vasto
As memory of the love of Christ who delivered himself to death for us, the work of the Via Crucis rings in a simple but profound way the good news of the infinite value of every grief offered with love. In the hour of suffering and trial this tells us that we are not alone: an Other has preceded us and gives significance to out solitude and our grief. This Other one is Jesus, Christ, the Crucified Resurrected from the dead: it is Him the Living One who continues to accompany us, loving us right to the end, even when our paths appear marked by the weight of solitude, of abandonment and of the trial that seems to crush us.
It is not individual grief alone which is reached and redeemed by His Cross: the memory of the Passion of our Lord also touches collective grief, the grief of time. The absence of sense and hope which frequently brings obscurity to the horizon of our life together, the violence and injustice which every day makes up the great history of the world and the small history of each one of us, find in the Passion of the Son of God a gleam of light, a source of strength and of new life. The path of the Cross leads to the Gospel that the Crucifixion, full of all human suffering and the infinite grief of not understanding its sense, is life risen again.
The cry of the Abandoned One has not been left unheard. The Father has resuscitated Him from the dead with the power of the life-giving Spirit. During our epoch sickened by lack of hope, Jesus vanquisher of death, offers himself as the great hope, that which does not delude, the sole one which opens the future voyage towards a confidence greater than any delusion or defeat. The God who gave a full and new life to the one Abandoned on Good Friday, is truly the God of life for all of us! The path of the Cross evokes in the sign of grief, the love which wins over suffering and death.
Exactly because of its permanent power of feeling, the Via Crucis has inspired the most diverse forms of human creativity: works of art, of poetry, of thought and prayer have deigned to relate it. It does not therefore surprise me that an Artist of our days, at the peak of his figurative itinerary, has felt the need to represent the Path of the Cross. Starting from the crisis of
where the Word is Light of Hope
by
Bruno Forte
Archbishop of Chieti Vasto
As memory of the love of Christ who delivered himself to death for us, the work of the Via Crucis rings in a simple but profound way the good news of the infinite value of every grief offered with love. In the hour of suffering and trial this tells us that we are not alone: an Other has preceded us and gives significance to out solitude and our grief. This Other one is Jesus, Christ, the Crucified Resurrected from the dead: it is Him the Living One who continues to accompany us, loving us right to the end, even when our paths appear marked by the weight of solitude, of abandonment and of the trial that seems to crush us.
It is not individual grief alone which is reached and redeemed by His Cross: the memory of the Passion of our Lord also touches collective grief, the grief of time. The absence of sense and hope which frequently brings obscurity to the horizon of our life together, the violence and injustice which every day makes up the great history of the world and the small history of each one of us, find in the Passion of the Son of God a gleam of light, a source of strength and of new life. The path of the Cross leads to the Gospel that the Crucifixion, full of all human suffering and the infinite grief of not understanding its sense, is life risen again.
The cry of the Abandoned One has not been left unheard. The Father has resuscitated Him from the dead with the power of the life-giving Spirit. During our epoch sickened by lack of hope, Jesus vanquisher of death, offers himself as the great hope, that which does not delude, the sole one which opens the future voyage towards a confidence greater than any delusion or defeat. The God who gave a full and new life to the one Abandoned on Good Friday, is truly the God of life for all of us! The path of the Cross evokes in the sign of grief, the love which wins over suffering and death.
Exactly because of its permanent power of feeling, the Via Crucis has inspired the most diverse forms of human creativity: works of art, of poetry, of thought and prayer have deigned to relate it. It does not therefore surprise me that an Artist of our days, at the peak of his figurative itinerary, has felt the need to represent the Path of the Cross. Starting from the crisis of
Trebeski - Natoli
Via Crucis
Unconsciousness is activated through various routes, one of which is an external stimulus. This, as a human component escapes from the intellectual sphere, but decisively influences the person’s actions.
In front of the Stations of Alberto Trebeschi’s Via Crucis I do not remain indifferent since the suffering of Christ is a violent stimulus which turns on the personal computer of unconsciousness. Each image is non finite and tends to integrate psychologically the message. This creates a welding between the sufferance of Christ and that of man. The colours play between strong and weaker tones and concur with illuminating the message that the artist offers, with infinite space for meditation. Doubt becomes the spring which saturates the intellect and will towards concrete conclusions.
Each Station is an icon (the negative of the photograph), an internal torment, an restlessness which leads to a purification of the spirit. Throughout the whole work, Christ is the dominant subject, the individual represented in turn is just background. The commitment to catch the detail of the suffering which emerges sometimes bursting out sometimes spread out in filigrees, leads to a profound concentration between intellect and emotion, and delivers an educational experience both unique and personal (hic et nunc); using the words of St. Paul: Fulfil in me Christ’s suffering. If Wagner’s music is defined as the music of unconsciousness then the Via Crucis of Alberto Trebeschi is the Via Crucis of unconsciousness.
Giuseppe Natoli
Unconsciousness is activated through various routes, one of which is an external stimulus. This, as a human component escapes from the intellectual sphere, but decisively influences the person’s actions.
In front of the Stations of Alberto Trebeschi’s Via Crucis I do not remain indifferent since the suffering of Christ is a violent stimulus which turns on the personal computer of unconsciousness. Each image is non finite and tends to integrate psychologically the message. This creates a welding between the sufferance of Christ and that of man. The colours play between strong and weaker tones and concur with illuminating the message that the artist offers, with infinite space for meditation. Doubt becomes the spring which saturates the intellect and will towards concrete conclusions.
Each Station is an icon (the negative of the photograph), an internal torment, an restlessness which leads to a purification of the spirit. Throughout the whole work, Christ is the dominant subject, the individual represented in turn is just background. The commitment to catch the detail of the suffering which emerges sometimes bursting out sometimes spread out in filigrees, leads to a profound concentration between intellect and emotion, and delivers an educational experience both unique and personal (hic et nunc); using the words of St. Paul: Fulfil in me Christ’s suffering. If Wagner’s music is defined as the music of unconsciousness then the Via Crucis of Alberto Trebeschi is the Via Crucis of unconsciousness.
Giuseppe Natoli
Trebeski - Centorame
Via Crucis
of Trebeschi
When one offers a Via Crucis to the public, immediately it sets off in the mind the conventional categories of religious art, almost as a separate category, reserved to limited and particular spheres.
In fact this conviction represents a prejudice of superficiality ignoring the complete history of Italian art and does not give due account to the fact that it concerns, especially in what is the culmination of the evangelical recount, a scream of suffering and of hope which is always universal. It is the message which concerns mankind, that of a death for a life.
This involves a theme which normally frightens artists but attracts them, from the mists of time, from the first steps of Christian iconography and which is always, due to its nature, of the populace: in fact, it is as much popular as it is universal.
The Via Crucis of Alberto Trebeschi is not an isolated moment during the artist’s search for sense and language but, rather, the result of a long interior voyage which presents during its itinerary moments of investigation and reflexion. Meditation on the Passion of Christ is, essentially and always, also any analysis of one’s own human condition, a profound verification of the whole meaning of one’s personal existential being.
In a justly famous comment on the Via Crucis, the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger held that the leitmotiv of this extraordinary narrative can be compared to the story of the seed of grain. “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and not die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” St. John 12:24
Trebeschi is a man who has the roots of his infancy and youth in the fertile earth of Lombardy and Emilia, and is used to observe and study the cycle of death which brings forth life. It is not by chance that the set of the Stations of his Via Crucis represents substantially a vicissitude in which life does not let go entirely the step towards resignation of definitive defeat.
His palette never speaks of the desperation of death which falls definitively on the human condition. The atrocious sufferings of Jesus are the sufferings of man that He shares exactly because his is not a condition of immovable detachment with regard to mankind but, rather, an event of sharing of suffering and, as a consequence, forever open to hope.
The painting of Trebeschi undertakes the difficult lot of transmitting the sense of a God who walks with us and is always, in every phase of the life of man and his history, our contemporary.
Even if from the first of the fifteen Stations the sign and image of the cross impends, Trebeschi’s representation is always open towards life. The very personal and well recognizable usage of colours bears witness to this. This reveals a precise attitude and language. The abundance of chromatic tones of green and blue are meant to signify a precise selection as a sign of hope and opening towards the other life. A metaphysical leap which is not only in art when involved in a holy subject but is in all communication of high spirituality and authentically human.
The expressive language of Trebeschi always maintains a solid course towards the fulfilment of humanity, that which allows one to follow a path which leads one to question legitimately the mystery of the dignity of mankind. He does not fall into current temptations of a nihilistic art which is always easily recognizable, exactly because this trends towards the humiliation of the human element.
This is the attitude of the artist towards mankind in its authenticity and which speaks of his opening towards God. Within the moments of essential interrogation he must find the force to affront arduous and difficult themes without fear of running into the audacity of the new, not having fear of falling into what has already been seen, affronting a theme which has evoke such creative energy. What the artist has suggested is above all a way of finding, within one’s own interior, an opening towards the dimension of mystery and faith.
Trebeschi’s that of a painting of interior landscapes, which whilst having a precise and dominant centre in the narration of the itinerary of the Via Crucis, struggles not to forget human nature in its entirety, even when inexorably arrives the moment of grief and prayer. This concerns a grief which penetrates the heart, not only the mother of the Crucified, but of all men who revive in the authenticity of the death of the Judge of the world.
Trebeschi does not halt in the description of men screaming like lunatics and seeking death. The crowd senses itself in pictorial representation as with the indecision of human conscience.
But those men who observe: on which side do they lie in the matter of the Passion and of the death of Christ. Where are they, where do they place themselves in this story of life and death. A brushstroke of Trebeschi full of a stong line of tension seems to want to push us not to be indifferent, to choose a role, to fall into and relive the scene of the crucifixion and death of God.
Even we are perhaps burdened down by the weight of the cross and, along our path fall down continuously, frequently under the encumbrance of emptiness and nothing. Even we seek the eyes of the Mother which comfort us and we trust that they will uplift us. An evocative and essential painting, coherent in all the Stations of this extremely difficult task.
Little by little as Jesus proceeds under the weight of the cross, until arriving naked at the extreme moment, the artist seems to understand that the pictorial language must become more rarefied, almost so as to describe the silence which impends over the supreme tragedy, over the absolute event of death for life.
One understands therefore that Jesus’ dishonour and insult belongs entirely to our humanity, it is our reply as ungrateful sons of an overabundance of love.
The painter uses grey to cover the sun in a early sundown and black to describe his and our sentiments. This pre-announces a sky from which unexpectedly light and stars have disappeared. A sky without signs and symbols, as in many respects is today’s reality.
Trebeschi has understood that the narration of the Via Crucis always has a contemporary value. It is the perennial actuality of the eternity of God. The painter’s language struggles to adhere to this projection beyond space and time.
There is never, in none of the Stations painted, the obscurity of resignment. There is rather, the understanding that the Sepulchre is empty and that the times to come are a future of light and not the obscurity of the inferi.
Vincenzo Centorame
of Trebeschi
When one offers a Via Crucis to the public, immediately it sets off in the mind the conventional categories of religious art, almost as a separate category, reserved to limited and particular spheres.
In fact this conviction represents a prejudice of superficiality ignoring the complete history of Italian art and does not give due account to the fact that it concerns, especially in what is the culmination of the evangelical recount, a scream of suffering and of hope which is always universal. It is the message which concerns mankind, that of a death for a life.
This involves a theme which normally frightens artists but attracts them, from the mists of time, from the first steps of Christian iconography and which is always, due to its nature, of the populace: in fact, it is as much popular as it is universal.
The Via Crucis of Alberto Trebeschi is not an isolated moment during the artist’s search for sense and language but, rather, the result of a long interior voyage which presents during its itinerary moments of investigation and reflexion. Meditation on the Passion of Christ is, essentially and always, also any analysis of one’s own human condition, a profound verification of the whole meaning of one’s personal existential being.
In a justly famous comment on the Via Crucis, the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger held that the leitmotiv of this extraordinary narrative can be compared to the story of the seed of grain. “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and not die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” St. John 12:24
Trebeschi is a man who has the roots of his infancy and youth in the fertile earth of Lombardy and Emilia, and is used to observe and study the cycle of death which brings forth life. It is not by chance that the set of the Stations of his Via Crucis represents substantially a vicissitude in which life does not let go entirely the step towards resignation of definitive defeat.
His palette never speaks of the desperation of death which falls definitively on the human condition. The atrocious sufferings of Jesus are the sufferings of man that He shares exactly because his is not a condition of immovable detachment with regard to mankind but, rather, an event of sharing of suffering and, as a consequence, forever open to hope.
The painting of Trebeschi undertakes the difficult lot of transmitting the sense of a God who walks with us and is always, in every phase of the life of man and his history, our contemporary.
Even if from the first of the fifteen Stations the sign and image of the cross impends, Trebeschi’s representation is always open towards life. The very personal and well recognizable usage of colours bears witness to this. This reveals a precise attitude and language. The abundance of chromatic tones of green and blue are meant to signify a precise selection as a sign of hope and opening towards the other life. A metaphysical leap which is not only in art when involved in a holy subject but is in all communication of high spirituality and authentically human.
The expressive language of Trebeschi always maintains a solid course towards the fulfilment of humanity, that which allows one to follow a path which leads one to question legitimately the mystery of the dignity of mankind. He does not fall into current temptations of a nihilistic art which is always easily recognizable, exactly because this trends towards the humiliation of the human element.
This is the attitude of the artist towards mankind in its authenticity and which speaks of his opening towards God. Within the moments of essential interrogation he must find the force to affront arduous and difficult themes without fear of running into the audacity of the new, not having fear of falling into what has already been seen, affronting a theme which has evoke such creative energy. What the artist has suggested is above all a way of finding, within one’s own interior, an opening towards the dimension of mystery and faith.
Trebeschi’s that of a painting of interior landscapes, which whilst having a precise and dominant centre in the narration of the itinerary of the Via Crucis, struggles not to forget human nature in its entirety, even when inexorably arrives the moment of grief and prayer. This concerns a grief which penetrates the heart, not only the mother of the Crucified, but of all men who revive in the authenticity of the death of the Judge of the world.
Trebeschi does not halt in the description of men screaming like lunatics and seeking death. The crowd senses itself in pictorial representation as with the indecision of human conscience.
But those men who observe: on which side do they lie in the matter of the Passion and of the death of Christ. Where are they, where do they place themselves in this story of life and death. A brushstroke of Trebeschi full of a stong line of tension seems to want to push us not to be indifferent, to choose a role, to fall into and relive the scene of the crucifixion and death of God.
Even we are perhaps burdened down by the weight of the cross and, along our path fall down continuously, frequently under the encumbrance of emptiness and nothing. Even we seek the eyes of the Mother which comfort us and we trust that they will uplift us. An evocative and essential painting, coherent in all the Stations of this extremely difficult task.
Little by little as Jesus proceeds under the weight of the cross, until arriving naked at the extreme moment, the artist seems to understand that the pictorial language must become more rarefied, almost so as to describe the silence which impends over the supreme tragedy, over the absolute event of death for life.
One understands therefore that Jesus’ dishonour and insult belongs entirely to our humanity, it is our reply as ungrateful sons of an overabundance of love.
The painter uses grey to cover the sun in a early sundown and black to describe his and our sentiments. This pre-announces a sky from which unexpectedly light and stars have disappeared. A sky without signs and symbols, as in many respects is today’s reality.
Trebeschi has understood that the narration of the Via Crucis always has a contemporary value. It is the perennial actuality of the eternity of God. The painter’s language struggles to adhere to this projection beyond space and time.
There is never, in none of the Stations painted, the obscurity of resignment. There is rather, the understanding that the Sepulchre is empty and that the times to come are a future of light and not the obscurity of the inferi.
Vincenzo Centorame
Trebeschi - Nerone
Alberto Trebeschi
An Engineer of colours
I have always known Alberto Trebeschi.
We were born in the same village, Villarotta in the Province of Reggio Emilia.
In this village there were more taverns than people. Fog and misery never left us but people cared for each other and sung even on an empty stomach. Today no-one sings anymore and who was there, today is no longer.
Alberto was always the brightest of the class with a vivid intelligence. But even then he was a profound artist – in fact, you are born an artist rather than becoming one, even if you decide to become an engineer. A journey and one is taken away from one’s own roots without however, forgetting them: Alberto was smarter than me escaping from this hollow so as to swim better, I am still here immersed in the fog and sorrow.
I have looked at his paintings well. The colours are soft and full of apparent gentleness whereas the marks and shadows are troubling, but I am able to see inside them. Alberto is a restless soul and science has not fulfilled him even if he has had success; this for him is not sufficient, he loves poetry and at all costs wants to be a poet. The poetry of colour absorbs a lot of time. You have to make her your wife and lover immerging in her up to one’s neck almost drowning so as to feel the step of the poet when he walks on water and in the blue sky touching with his hands the breath of God: and this is what I felt with the Via Crucis of Alberto.
On occasions studying blocks the spontaneity of exiting free from all thoughts, thinking is bad for the painter, the mind darts here and there seeking a grip and creates only confusion, impeding you to express what you truly are. This is a lesson that Alberto has learnt well, in his pictures the liberty of his strokes is witness to the joy and originality of his creation.
Looking at the Via Crucis I halted at the second station – the Cross – and I felt the unsupportable weight of existence which I have never sought but which life has imposed on me.
Meeting Maria I discovered a man exhausted and confused between strips of flesh and bone speared, ready to be put on the spit over a scorching fire which burns life so as to create another life further ahead. Veronica, albeit in a tragic situation, for me is full of and overflows with sexuality which is the most beautiful poetry which God has created; enter and exit under a rainfall of love.
In the third downfall one can make out the image of a woman with her eyes closed in a deep slumber whilst someone observes her without being noticed to love her all the more. Sleep is the death which wanders through existence’s darkness.
Death on the Cross is the world of a woman much loved who cannot love, death cannot ever love life: this painting has an extraordinary energy of possession which has only the true lover.
The sepulchre is the synthesis of violence, it’s Munch’s Scream, it’s a self portrait which does not sufficiently hide itself since it wants to be noticed.
It’s four in the morning and my thoughts are intact and clear, it gives me an immense pleasure to speak of your paintings, dear Alberto, and I also hear the ring of the bells of Villarotta, hanging between two beams tired from supporting them.
Our youth has gone, devoured by time, but something still lives on in us. I feel that one day you will no longer be an engineer, you will no longer have to undertake the calculations requested of you by your scientific world, but you will live in the world of poets, of colour and every day there will be a new rainbow which will illuminate your thoughts and tint them with red, with blue, with green, with pink and you will feel happy to be born.
With a warm embrace
Nerone
Sergio Terzi
An Engineer of colours
I have always known Alberto Trebeschi.
We were born in the same village, Villarotta in the Province of Reggio Emilia.
In this village there were more taverns than people. Fog and misery never left us but people cared for each other and sung even on an empty stomach. Today no-one sings anymore and who was there, today is no longer.
Alberto was always the brightest of the class with a vivid intelligence. But even then he was a profound artist – in fact, you are born an artist rather than becoming one, even if you decide to become an engineer. A journey and one is taken away from one’s own roots without however, forgetting them: Alberto was smarter than me escaping from this hollow so as to swim better, I am still here immersed in the fog and sorrow.
I have looked at his paintings well. The colours are soft and full of apparent gentleness whereas the marks and shadows are troubling, but I am able to see inside them. Alberto is a restless soul and science has not fulfilled him even if he has had success; this for him is not sufficient, he loves poetry and at all costs wants to be a poet. The poetry of colour absorbs a lot of time. You have to make her your wife and lover immerging in her up to one’s neck almost drowning so as to feel the step of the poet when he walks on water and in the blue sky touching with his hands the breath of God: and this is what I felt with the Via Crucis of Alberto.
On occasions studying blocks the spontaneity of exiting free from all thoughts, thinking is bad for the painter, the mind darts here and there seeking a grip and creates only confusion, impeding you to express what you truly are. This is a lesson that Alberto has learnt well, in his pictures the liberty of his strokes is witness to the joy and originality of his creation.
Looking at the Via Crucis I halted at the second station – the Cross – and I felt the unsupportable weight of existence which I have never sought but which life has imposed on me.
Meeting Maria I discovered a man exhausted and confused between strips of flesh and bone speared, ready to be put on the spit over a scorching fire which burns life so as to create another life further ahead. Veronica, albeit in a tragic situation, for me is full of and overflows with sexuality which is the most beautiful poetry which God has created; enter and exit under a rainfall of love.
In the third downfall one can make out the image of a woman with her eyes closed in a deep slumber whilst someone observes her without being noticed to love her all the more. Sleep is the death which wanders through existence’s darkness.
Death on the Cross is the world of a woman much loved who cannot love, death cannot ever love life: this painting has an extraordinary energy of possession which has only the true lover.
The sepulchre is the synthesis of violence, it’s Munch’s Scream, it’s a self portrait which does not sufficiently hide itself since it wants to be noticed.
It’s four in the morning and my thoughts are intact and clear, it gives me an immense pleasure to speak of your paintings, dear Alberto, and I also hear the ring of the bells of Villarotta, hanging between two beams tired from supporting them.
Our youth has gone, devoured by time, but something still lives on in us. I feel that one day you will no longer be an engineer, you will no longer have to undertake the calculations requested of you by your scientific world, but you will live in the world of poets, of colour and every day there will be a new rainbow which will illuminate your thoughts and tint them with red, with blue, with green, with pink and you will feel happy to be born.
With a warm embrace
Nerone
Sergio Terzi
Trebeski - Zanichelli
Alberto Trebeski
Chromatic thoughts
“One invents alone a technique, a procedure; one does not make up a state of mind”.
This phrase of Juan Gris, one of the fathers of modern art and co-founder of cubism, seems to be representative of the pictorial work of Trebeski.
A state of mind, a way of “feeling” and “hearing” a condition of thought which is reflected in actions, gestures, sensations, feelings and hopes which invade our brain.
All this is expressed in the art of poetry, music, architecture, philosophy and in Trebeski with an infinite sequence of “pictorial thoughts” describing a long artistic voyage.
Prior to every constructive act man has painted and the priority of this gesture will always accompany him. Painting, therefore, as an instrument to reflect on the rapport and relationship that man maintains with his “psychological inner self” and as a possibility for a conversation with the infinite universe which surrounds him.
An extension of thought which translates into chromatic matter.
There is not alone an aesthetic value in the works of art, but as in all the artistic production of Trebeski, there is the means and the necessity of approaching the founding values of our life.
His childhood in the Po valley, in those places which witnessed the birth of the poetry of Italian neo-realism with the writings and screenplays of Zavattini and the pictorial images of the naïf and expressionist art of Ligabue, Rovesti, Ghizzardi and Colombo, certainly influenced his first artistic period.
The predominance of a strong contextual rapport with the culture of the Po valley/Emilia led him to leave his professional path (Trebeski holds a degree in engineering from Bologna) to push him to confront that world of pictorial art which comes before any other gesture.
The artistic activity of Trebeski in his first period is characterised by frequent attendance at the artistic workshops of Tode, Pellegrini, Gradi and Leoni, which brought about in the artist the first fundamentals of an expressionist language with characteristics and references to the sphere of romantic art.
In the figurative themes of landscapes and still life, Trebeski uses almost a monochromatic style of colour which seems to wrap and blend the subject and background into a single image. There is certainly in this initial expressive method a strong artistic evocation of the 18th century classicism of Bolognese painting, encroaching it with a personal linguistic specificity of slender and vibrant deformations of the subjects represented.
Perhaps the most appropriate pictorial references to the poetry of the Trebeskian language can be found in the expressionist work of Alexy Jawlensky such as “Brughiera di sera” of 1911 or “Piccola variazione” of 1917 where the landscape (natural element) and the sky-line of the cities (unnatural elements) seem to merge into a single prospective image. The conceptual aspect is seen in the lengthening of the traditional canons of a prospective image, by way of a visual fusion of the line of the horizon with the visual point of the subject.
Therefore an anti-classical language in which the use of equilibrated colours transforms the outline of the work’s figurative elements in a “veiled” and “vibrant” field of image in which the drawn subject, be it a person or a landscape, symbioses with every element of the work’s composition. A sort of pre-informale which has, in its chromatic equilibrium, an important moment of interrelation between the various elements of the work.
Also the works of Adol Holzel in “Perdono”, a religious scene dated 1906 or his stupendous “Paesaggi ornamentali” of the early 1900’s and the works of Emil Nolde such as “L’adorazione di Magi” of the beginning period of the 1900’s, seem to be precise models of reference to his initial expressive language.
This emotive representation as defined by Renato Barilli during a visit to Trebeski’s workshop towards the end of the seventies is the dominant theme of an “expressionist-baroque” painting which links the gestural and sensual aspect with the fundamental theme of his historical and cultural matrix as a painter.
It will be a journey which brings him to the “simplification of the image”, so defining his subsequent artistic production.
Perhaps a means to introduce us to the “mystery of the appearances”, a sort of mystic language which, in some works, invades the field of faith and religion, but perhaps more realistically it is a definitive introduction to the primordial elements of a “figuration-deformation-abstraction” which will characterise the pictorial work of Trebeski in the eighties and taken up with greater chromatic gestuality in his work of the nineties and in that of the most recent period.
In one of my earlier opinions I defined it as “entropic painting” implying, in the work of Trebeski, that there is always the possibility of accepting in the formal, expressive, chromatic composition other elements, sequential scores, gestures which can superimpose or integrate with the initial structure of “Opere aperte”, catalyst of Trebeski’s silent and very introspective thoughts which seem to evocate, with this specific language of his, the desire for a recovery of the historic memory of the artist: places and fundamental values of his youth.
Essentially I believe one can speak of a simple “popular art” as in the images of landscapes and urban scenes in the pictorial works of Zavattini (also the same equilibrium and chromatic score seem to be a direct reference) and, perhaps, with a greater gestural impact, the works of Trebeski seem to talk with the themes of “expressive freedom” of the Cobra Group, in particular K. Appel in the deformation of the image and of A. Jorn in the fluidity of the lines and colours by means of a perfect equilibrium of chromatic surfaces as in the stupendous work “Sulle ali dei cigni” of 1963.
Trebeski therefore seems to sweep in his research to the artistic matrices which have a meeting place in the “subtle introspection of myself” and the “contextuality of the places” the conceptual themes of a personal artistic language.
This “new figuration” codifies not only in a laceration of the image but in the poetry of a subjectuality which is the reflexion of a veiled romanticism and of a need to recover the social aspects of contemporary life.
It is perhaps the meeting with Primo Conti in the eighties or the influence of Carlo Corsi (from the same town as Trebeski) which determined the artistic canons of his painting. Figures wrapped in a haunting melancholy, a romanticism of the landscape which transforms ideally the contamination of a mass-media society and ever always constituted by virtual and ephemeral aspects.
The successive step for Trebeski is getting close to the expressionist-abstract painting of the linguistic influence of German neo-realism of the eighties of A. Kiefer, M. Luperz and G. Baseliz and of the search of the figuration of Italian trans-avant-garde and in particular S. Chia, E. Cucchi and M. Germanà and pushing himself towards an elegant and lyrical virtuoso-expressionism of J. Schnabel.
This important effort of researching the themes of contemporary art in the eighties, brought Trebeski to an encounter, perhaps unexpected, with a more abstract language derived both from a pictorial transformation of the subject (figure and place) in polychromatic forms and background as a recovery of the first abstract matrices of W. Kadinsky as well as from that equilibrium of composition produced from the “chromatic fading” as in the pictorial research of A. Corpora.
In fact I also find references to a sort of surrealist painting, intimate, but of simple chromatic perspectives in the first works of G. Sutherland as in “Sunset behind the hills” of 1937 but interpreting it with a personal poetic language.
With attentive reflection, Trebeski takes us to the point of departure of his “artistic story”. This abstract gesturality of the Italian landscape is common in the artists of his same region: Zavattini, Mandelli (both of Luzzara as is Trebeski) and Morlotti for whom the place of origin (in this case a small village of the lower Reggio, sited on the Po river) has been able to define his first linguistic themes joining them with a constant continuity with his recent work.
A sort of fine “Arianna’s thread” which blends in an interesting and sophisticated “unicum pittorico” the personal and artistic story of Trebeski: place, memories and art.
As R. Birolli reminds us in a letter of 1955 sent to his art dealer A. Cavellini of Brescia: “Colours and forms are those of reality. Whatever we invent answers to the very process of nature and it is never arbitrary. Now the sea is tired and it’s bloated and oily. The light is an intense spectre, seeming a paranoia of nature. I had a great moment of happiness when I came inside at sundown to think of the external rage amongst the whispering quietness of the walls”.
With these sensations of colour and forms representing reality, Trebeski has accompanied us on a fantastic voyage of art.
Looking forward that he will soon gift us many more adventures.
Sergio Zanichelli
Sergio Zanichelli: Essayist and modern and contemporary art critic, Professor at the University of Ferrara.
Chromatic thoughts
“One invents alone a technique, a procedure; one does not make up a state of mind”.
This phrase of Juan Gris, one of the fathers of modern art and co-founder of cubism, seems to be representative of the pictorial work of Trebeski.
A state of mind, a way of “feeling” and “hearing” a condition of thought which is reflected in actions, gestures, sensations, feelings and hopes which invade our brain.
All this is expressed in the art of poetry, music, architecture, philosophy and in Trebeski with an infinite sequence of “pictorial thoughts” describing a long artistic voyage.
Prior to every constructive act man has painted and the priority of this gesture will always accompany him. Painting, therefore, as an instrument to reflect on the rapport and relationship that man maintains with his “psychological inner self” and as a possibility for a conversation with the infinite universe which surrounds him.
An extension of thought which translates into chromatic matter.
There is not alone an aesthetic value in the works of art, but as in all the artistic production of Trebeski, there is the means and the necessity of approaching the founding values of our life.
His childhood in the Po valley, in those places which witnessed the birth of the poetry of Italian neo-realism with the writings and screenplays of Zavattini and the pictorial images of the naïf and expressionist art of Ligabue, Rovesti, Ghizzardi and Colombo, certainly influenced his first artistic period.
The predominance of a strong contextual rapport with the culture of the Po valley/Emilia led him to leave his professional path (Trebeski holds a degree in engineering from Bologna) to push him to confront that world of pictorial art which comes before any other gesture.
The artistic activity of Trebeski in his first period is characterised by frequent attendance at the artistic workshops of Tode, Pellegrini, Gradi and Leoni, which brought about in the artist the first fundamentals of an expressionist language with characteristics and references to the sphere of romantic art.
In the figurative themes of landscapes and still life, Trebeski uses almost a monochromatic style of colour which seems to wrap and blend the subject and background into a single image. There is certainly in this initial expressive method a strong artistic evocation of the 18th century classicism of Bolognese painting, encroaching it with a personal linguistic specificity of slender and vibrant deformations of the subjects represented.
Perhaps the most appropriate pictorial references to the poetry of the Trebeskian language can be found in the expressionist work of Alexy Jawlensky such as “Brughiera di sera” of 1911 or “Piccola variazione” of 1917 where the landscape (natural element) and the sky-line of the cities (unnatural elements) seem to merge into a single prospective image. The conceptual aspect is seen in the lengthening of the traditional canons of a prospective image, by way of a visual fusion of the line of the horizon with the visual point of the subject.
Therefore an anti-classical language in which the use of equilibrated colours transforms the outline of the work’s figurative elements in a “veiled” and “vibrant” field of image in which the drawn subject, be it a person or a landscape, symbioses with every element of the work’s composition. A sort of pre-informale which has, in its chromatic equilibrium, an important moment of interrelation between the various elements of the work.
Also the works of Adol Holzel in “Perdono”, a religious scene dated 1906 or his stupendous “Paesaggi ornamentali” of the early 1900’s and the works of Emil Nolde such as “L’adorazione di Magi” of the beginning period of the 1900’s, seem to be precise models of reference to his initial expressive language.
This emotive representation as defined by Renato Barilli during a visit to Trebeski’s workshop towards the end of the seventies is the dominant theme of an “expressionist-baroque” painting which links the gestural and sensual aspect with the fundamental theme of his historical and cultural matrix as a painter.
It will be a journey which brings him to the “simplification of the image”, so defining his subsequent artistic production.
Perhaps a means to introduce us to the “mystery of the appearances”, a sort of mystic language which, in some works, invades the field of faith and religion, but perhaps more realistically it is a definitive introduction to the primordial elements of a “figuration-deformation-abstraction” which will characterise the pictorial work of Trebeski in the eighties and taken up with greater chromatic gestuality in his work of the nineties and in that of the most recent period.
In one of my earlier opinions I defined it as “entropic painting” implying, in the work of Trebeski, that there is always the possibility of accepting in the formal, expressive, chromatic composition other elements, sequential scores, gestures which can superimpose or integrate with the initial structure of “Opere aperte”, catalyst of Trebeski’s silent and very introspective thoughts which seem to evocate, with this specific language of his, the desire for a recovery of the historic memory of the artist: places and fundamental values of his youth.
Essentially I believe one can speak of a simple “popular art” as in the images of landscapes and urban scenes in the pictorial works of Zavattini (also the same equilibrium and chromatic score seem to be a direct reference) and, perhaps, with a greater gestural impact, the works of Trebeski seem to talk with the themes of “expressive freedom” of the Cobra Group, in particular K. Appel in the deformation of the image and of A. Jorn in the fluidity of the lines and colours by means of a perfect equilibrium of chromatic surfaces as in the stupendous work “Sulle ali dei cigni” of 1963.
Trebeski therefore seems to sweep in his research to the artistic matrices which have a meeting place in the “subtle introspection of myself” and the “contextuality of the places” the conceptual themes of a personal artistic language.
This “new figuration” codifies not only in a laceration of the image but in the poetry of a subjectuality which is the reflexion of a veiled romanticism and of a need to recover the social aspects of contemporary life.
It is perhaps the meeting with Primo Conti in the eighties or the influence of Carlo Corsi (from the same town as Trebeski) which determined the artistic canons of his painting. Figures wrapped in a haunting melancholy, a romanticism of the landscape which transforms ideally the contamination of a mass-media society and ever always constituted by virtual and ephemeral aspects.
The successive step for Trebeski is getting close to the expressionist-abstract painting of the linguistic influence of German neo-realism of the eighties of A. Kiefer, M. Luperz and G. Baseliz and of the search of the figuration of Italian trans-avant-garde and in particular S. Chia, E. Cucchi and M. Germanà and pushing himself towards an elegant and lyrical virtuoso-expressionism of J. Schnabel.
This important effort of researching the themes of contemporary art in the eighties, brought Trebeski to an encounter, perhaps unexpected, with a more abstract language derived both from a pictorial transformation of the subject (figure and place) in polychromatic forms and background as a recovery of the first abstract matrices of W. Kadinsky as well as from that equilibrium of composition produced from the “chromatic fading” as in the pictorial research of A. Corpora.
In fact I also find references to a sort of surrealist painting, intimate, but of simple chromatic perspectives in the first works of G. Sutherland as in “Sunset behind the hills” of 1937 but interpreting it with a personal poetic language.
With attentive reflection, Trebeski takes us to the point of departure of his “artistic story”. This abstract gesturality of the Italian landscape is common in the artists of his same region: Zavattini, Mandelli (both of Luzzara as is Trebeski) and Morlotti for whom the place of origin (in this case a small village of the lower Reggio, sited on the Po river) has been able to define his first linguistic themes joining them with a constant continuity with his recent work.
A sort of fine “Arianna’s thread” which blends in an interesting and sophisticated “unicum pittorico” the personal and artistic story of Trebeski: place, memories and art.
As R. Birolli reminds us in a letter of 1955 sent to his art dealer A. Cavellini of Brescia: “Colours and forms are those of reality. Whatever we invent answers to the very process of nature and it is never arbitrary. Now the sea is tired and it’s bloated and oily. The light is an intense spectre, seeming a paranoia of nature. I had a great moment of happiness when I came inside at sundown to think of the external rage amongst the whispering quietness of the walls”.
With these sensations of colour and forms representing reality, Trebeski has accompanied us on a fantastic voyage of art.
Looking forward that he will soon gift us many more adventures.
Sergio Zanichelli
Sergio Zanichelli: Essayist and modern and contemporary art critic, Professor at the University of Ferrara.
Trebeski - Leidi
Alberto Trebeski
Between symbolism, emotional impressionism and abstract expressionism
When one begins to evaluate the work of a Master, one generally collects together all possible material including the analyses of other art critics or simple admirers. In the case of Trebeski I have available an extra element which gives me a significant advantage over all those who have written or will write about him. Alberto and I are childhood friends and therefore I have been able to follow the evolution of his painting from the very first steps, comparing it with his wellbeing, the rapport with certain events, with others and with life in general.
I can take the merit (or blame) for introducing Trebeski to Primo Conti, the Master who Pablo Picasso defined as l’enfant prodige at the beginning of the 1900’s. In the villa at Fiesole where the great Master lived and worked, Trebeski was able to touch with his very hand the birth of Conti’s works, he could share the profound labour that an artist must go through in order to express his true feelings, and he acquired the secrets of technique and means to express himself.
I believe that it was only then that Trebeski, letting flow without any sentimental or emotional mask, was able to achieve a sense to the voyage of his own being that started with his first efforts.
Approaching the painting of Alberto Trebeschi (Trebeski), the soul of the observer is struck by the sensation of recognizing what he is looking at without being able to define it consciously. The paintings, in fact, describe man’s emotions albeit through a cultured process of symbolic simplification of form and colour. The viewer is only able to glimpse reality giving flow to the memories and emotions of his own existence without trying to discover a rational relationship between signs and colours.
Trebeski is a painter who profoundly understands the art that has preceded him but has reorganized the principles according to a very personal way of feeling which, for example, in paintings such as Breve incontro, Panteismo or Presenze, seems to develop along the lines of what we can define as emotional impressionism. In fact, in his work there reappears that apparent incompleteness of form and relationship that in 1874 led the critic Louis Leroy to define as impressionist the paintings of Monet, Manet and Renoir. Now, deliberately, he veils further using the filter of emotion.
The impression of reality is picked up by Trebeski when overcome by joy, sadness, love or ecstasy, he is not ashamed to express his most profound sentiments making the world easier understood in all its enormous vitality. This indeed is the explosive force of his work and through this new and extremely particular emotive process we are offered a vision of reality which, although being profoundly his, pushes us to start communicating with the most hidden and real of our feelings.
In all the works of Trebeski one observes, as has already been said, an intense process of symbolic simplification at the limit of consciousness and unconsciousness which undoubtedly draws in the observer, but especially expresses the emotive involvement of the artist himself. The violence with which the emotion is represented, the essentiality of lines and colours, places him very close to abstract expressionism.
However, it is neither of abstract expressionism nor emotional impressionism, as previously stated, that I wish to talk about: in fact I profoundly believe that this is a new path of expressive art. For example, in New York 9/11, in Bagdad 2007 or in the series of the four Seasons of Life, he clearly plays with a symbolism aware of the forms, whereas his works such as Sahel 2007, Motociclista or Ophelia essentially let you be lead by unconscious perception. Unconscious perception which pushes him to further simplify the signs pushing even more so these works towards the symbolic minimalism of the form which remain however, always violently upheld by the colours.
In part, the phrase of Gustave Moreau – “I only believe in what I don’t see and exclusively in what I feel” – seems appropriate for the paintings of Trebeski who, perhaps also due to his scientific background, extrapolates the most profound significance so as to overcome any limitations as, for example, is clearly evident in the Numbers series, the Mangiatore di Pesce or the Pianeta Rossa.
Such art can therefore be considered living works in continuous change since the emotions that they create in the observer do not derive exclusively from what has been fixed on the canvas but rather, from one occasion to another, a changing emotion according to the humour of the person looking at them.
In conclusion, Alberto my friend, continue to tear yourself apart, open yourself to us with your works, allow us through your eyes and your heart to admire the grandness, the joy and the desperation of man and the whole world.
Angelo Leidi
Art Critic
Between symbolism, emotional impressionism and abstract expressionism
When one begins to evaluate the work of a Master, one generally collects together all possible material including the analyses of other art critics or simple admirers. In the case of Trebeski I have available an extra element which gives me a significant advantage over all those who have written or will write about him. Alberto and I are childhood friends and therefore I have been able to follow the evolution of his painting from the very first steps, comparing it with his wellbeing, the rapport with certain events, with others and with life in general.
I can take the merit (or blame) for introducing Trebeski to Primo Conti, the Master who Pablo Picasso defined as l’enfant prodige at the beginning of the 1900’s. In the villa at Fiesole where the great Master lived and worked, Trebeski was able to touch with his very hand the birth of Conti’s works, he could share the profound labour that an artist must go through in order to express his true feelings, and he acquired the secrets of technique and means to express himself.
I believe that it was only then that Trebeski, letting flow without any sentimental or emotional mask, was able to achieve a sense to the voyage of his own being that started with his first efforts.
Approaching the painting of Alberto Trebeschi (Trebeski), the soul of the observer is struck by the sensation of recognizing what he is looking at without being able to define it consciously. The paintings, in fact, describe man’s emotions albeit through a cultured process of symbolic simplification of form and colour. The viewer is only able to glimpse reality giving flow to the memories and emotions of his own existence without trying to discover a rational relationship between signs and colours.
Trebeski is a painter who profoundly understands the art that has preceded him but has reorganized the principles according to a very personal way of feeling which, for example, in paintings such as Breve incontro, Panteismo or Presenze, seems to develop along the lines of what we can define as emotional impressionism. In fact, in his work there reappears that apparent incompleteness of form and relationship that in 1874 led the critic Louis Leroy to define as impressionist the paintings of Monet, Manet and Renoir. Now, deliberately, he veils further using the filter of emotion.
The impression of reality is picked up by Trebeski when overcome by joy, sadness, love or ecstasy, he is not ashamed to express his most profound sentiments making the world easier understood in all its enormous vitality. This indeed is the explosive force of his work and through this new and extremely particular emotive process we are offered a vision of reality which, although being profoundly his, pushes us to start communicating with the most hidden and real of our feelings.
In all the works of Trebeski one observes, as has already been said, an intense process of symbolic simplification at the limit of consciousness and unconsciousness which undoubtedly draws in the observer, but especially expresses the emotive involvement of the artist himself. The violence with which the emotion is represented, the essentiality of lines and colours, places him very close to abstract expressionism.
However, it is neither of abstract expressionism nor emotional impressionism, as previously stated, that I wish to talk about: in fact I profoundly believe that this is a new path of expressive art. For example, in New York 9/11, in Bagdad 2007 or in the series of the four Seasons of Life, he clearly plays with a symbolism aware of the forms, whereas his works such as Sahel 2007, Motociclista or Ophelia essentially let you be lead by unconscious perception. Unconscious perception which pushes him to further simplify the signs pushing even more so these works towards the symbolic minimalism of the form which remain however, always violently upheld by the colours.
In part, the phrase of Gustave Moreau – “I only believe in what I don’t see and exclusively in what I feel” – seems appropriate for the paintings of Trebeski who, perhaps also due to his scientific background, extrapolates the most profound significance so as to overcome any limitations as, for example, is clearly evident in the Numbers series, the Mangiatore di Pesce or the Pianeta Rossa.
Such art can therefore be considered living works in continuous change since the emotions that they create in the observer do not derive exclusively from what has been fixed on the canvas but rather, from one occasion to another, a changing emotion according to the humour of the person looking at them.
In conclusion, Alberto my friend, continue to tear yourself apart, open yourself to us with your works, allow us through your eyes and your heart to admire the grandness, the joy and the desperation of man and the whole world.
Angelo Leidi
Art Critic
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