Borgo Museo | Sculture 1976 – 2004
Biography
Aristide Coluccini was born in Valdicastello Carducci on June 17, 1915. After graduating from the Art Institute of Pietrasanta, he studied at the Art School of Florence and subsequently completed his artistic studies in Carrara and Rome, where he attended the Higher School of Fine Arts. During the war years he was an extraordinary professor of drawing at the Cassino Middle School. After the war he returned to teaching art education at the Lower Middle Schools in Castelnuovo di Garfagnana, in Viareggio and finally in Pietrasanta. However, like all true Versilia people who are difficult to uproot from their land, he returns many times to Versilia to work in the garden of his house. The artist’s participation in the various national exhibitions are among the most varied, while the personal ones are rarer and we remember in particular his first one at the “Cavour” gallery in Milan; the one in Legnano in 1970 and the last one in Forte dei Marmi in 1977, the year in which Aristide died in Camaiore.
Philosophy
His drawings are inspired by precise facts of deterioration of the streets, from the walls of the houses to the folds of the faces. Initially he used to draw landscapes, the sea, everything he saw around himself; as time goes by, in the midst of a beautiful landscape, he feels more attracted by some cracks in the ground or by certain hollows in some rocks. These subjects are messages for him that transmit vigour, enthusiasm and strength to live; he finds in them the primordial strength and that freedom of his “I”, which he can fantasise through these random signs and search for images within his imagination.
Artwork in Castagno
The work created by Coluccini in Castagno di Piteccio takes the name of Uccello (Bird); it is a sculpture whose minimal simplicity can be hermetically disarming at first glance. It represents a small bird, carved in stone, resting under a terracotta roof; from this work the typical characteristics of the author emerge: a particular attention paid to the natural world and a very personal style that tends towards primitivism, an artistic current according to which the state of nature, pervaded by an unattainable mental purity, and evolutionary state of the wild that only complies with natural laws, represent the best possible condition of life. His works are outlined by intuitive, basic signs and solid, elementary forms suggested to him by the very nature that surrounds him.