Borgo Museo | Sculture 1976 – 2004
Biography
Enrico Bandelli was born in Florence in 1941, where he lives and works. The meeting with professor Rodolfo Margheri was fundamental for his education, encouraging him to carry on the passion that made him draw and paint since he was a boy. As soon as he was twenty he joined the GADA group, gaining his first successes and awards in the artistic field. In 1968 he made his debut with his first personal exhibition at Dante’s house in Florence, presented by the painter Renzo Grazzini (author of the Marzo fresco here in Castagno), whose teachings will be of great inspiration and help. Later he became passionate about lithography and in the second half of the 1960s he produced the first copies, discovering new paths in the field of art. In ’75 he was invited to the Rome Quadriennale and in ’77 to the Fiorino Biennale in Florence. He then exhibits in various Italian cities and abroad, America, Australia, Japan, England, Spain and China.
Philosophy
The artist is engaged in a continuous research on colours, from bright to pastel tones, up to the use of white. The emotions that the works convey are therefore often associated with the use of colours, lines, more marked or more nuanced, while the subjects are often still lifes or landscapes; less frequent are human figures, if anything used only to highlight some details, such as the feet in the work in Castagno. Some works, such as those of the “Materic chromatism” series, are characterised by the use of very strong and contrasting colours. It is the stroke of color itself that defines the shapes, which become almost irrelevant to the effect of the color. Particular is also the contrast of the paintings of the series “the essence of color”, which depict fantasy landscapes, almost like a cartoon, with clear lines and stylised shapes, with those of the series “rays of the sun”, in which the shapes are they confuse each other in a continuous nuance.
Artwork in Castagno
The shoes represented at the intersection of two roads within the town, near the house that was once the Castagno school (as the small plaque on the wall recalls), are a work commissioned by Tommaso Paloscia and created by Enrico Bandelli and he entitled Sosta. They are one of the few sculptures created by Enrico, who in his life as an artist concentrated mainly on painting. He decides to represent the “pause” of two passers-by by showing only their shoes and not the rest of the body, because according to him the feet are the part of the body that communicates the most: the feet keep us on the ground, in contact with the world that it is nature. The eyes, on the other hand, according to his point of view, do not communicate in a sincere and direct way, because a person can have a wall in front of him and not transmit his true inner self to the other person. Also at that time he was surrounded by people he didn’t trust, so Enrico tries to give a direct and also personal message with this particular choice. It is perhaps not just a coincidence, to find Bandelli’s work next to the old school of the village: it reminds us that education should offer the tools for freedom of thought and make people understand that the natural world on which we rest our feet and build houses hosts humanity (and not vice versa).