Borgo Museo | Sculture 1976 – 2004
Biography
Gino Conti was a true Florentine, a lover of his Florence, a man who did not have a too easy life, a man who was always encouraged and helped to conquer his own artistic space from his wife, who was a constant point of reference throughout his life. He was born in Florence on October 17, 1929 in Piazza Dalmazia. During the Second World War together with his father he helps the partisans and various Jewish families. Also in the same 1950s he met Maria Vittoria who soon became his wife. The figure of this woman was decisive for the development of the artistic side of Gino Conti, it was she who gave him the first kit for oil painting. Gino Conti died on May 3, 1996.
Philosophy
Gino Conti began his career as an artist by becoming familiar with oil painting, complete with an easel and palette for outdoor painting. At the end of the 1950s he wins a competition as a geographic map designer. This episode was an important influence on his subsequent pictorial development which led him to an increasingly accurate search for precision and cleanliness of the stroke and color. A few years later Gino Conti completely detaches himself from his figurative vision and begins a new path on abstract themes. In the following years, he always devoted himself to this abstract trend, also dedicating himself to sculpture, with works on marble and pietra serena. 1979 represents the culminating point of his artistic career; he completely abandons the abstract theme and returns to figurative painting, a style in which he synthesises his previous experiences. Not being able to use oil colours anymore, due to an annoying allergy developed over the years with the use of thinners, he tries to recreate, with acrylic colours, the color and warmth that he had managed to obtain in the first figurative period with a particular use of oil tempera. Through a meticulous use of glazes he manages to recreate in his paintings a sensation of constant, warm light, difficult to obtain with the acrylic technique.
Artwork in Castagno
Euclidean 1° is the title of his sculpture for the Castagno Open Air Museum: a stone composition consisting of three simple and solid geometric bottom right and the other filled and protruding, top left. Near the empty circle, three engravings are visible, three vertical lines parallel to each other. The work shows the style of the artist sought during the period in which he distances himself from his figurative vision and begins a new abstractionist path. The title of the work, however, refers to geometry, to Euclid’s first theorem: in a right triangle, the square built on one of the two legs is equivalent to the rectangle whose dimensions are the projection of the cathetous on the hypotenuse and the hypotenuse itself.