Biography

Serafino Beconi is a painter and sculptor from Viareggio, widely known not only in Tuscany, a native of Torre del Lago, born in 1925, he died in his beloved Viareggio in 1997. With a passionate character and fertile imagination, he is known for being a cultured artist, a portrait painter and a landscape painter, an expert on the Versilian landscape dominated by the sea, “that sea that had in its soul and represented it each time with the ability that was its own, to stimulate it and spread a magical light around it”, to put it with the words of the critic Tommaso Paloscia.

Philosophy

Beconi’s imagination is inspired by the sensations arising from the impact with reality. From the lesson of the Viareggio painter Lorenzo Viani takes up the taste for simplicity. His painting is strong and in fact brought back to the essential. He is characterised by his great ability to tell the stories he has experienced and the feelings aroused in him by painful events, such as those of ’44. In a hundred canvases he manages to tell the horrors and pain of the massacre of Sant’Anna di Stazzema, with the intensity and tension of the colours that enhance the terror and violence. Beconi has the ability to penetrate the meanings and hidden messages of the events and horrors of the war that he himself experienced, as we can also see in the episodes told along the external side of the parish of Torre del Lago.

Artwork in Castagno

In Mitologie (Mythologies), exhibited along the facade of Casa Paloscia in La Vigna, the search for the fable and the underlying allegory are clearly evident. The crazy formal “disfigurements” of Expressionist derivation are intended to represent allegories in a modern key, through plastic processing and a convincing modelling of the lands in bas-reliefs. The plastic material is scratched and carved, in a subtle play of solids and voids and the terracotta that he called “the mother earth”, regains its original color during the firing phase. Here also the spectacle of the sea dominates, the sea of ​​Viareggio and Torre del Lago, a subject also present in his paintings since 1970. Its sea which, as Paloscia says, transmits “the immediate sensation of possession of the sea element that Beconi it can represent in its infinite mutations and that it manages to pour out agitated and violent […] to excite the imagination but also the tension of the observer”. Curiosity: while the terracotta with the words Casa di Nara and Tommaso was expressly designed for Casa Paloscia, the other with the words Casa di Marisa was initially placed in the home of Simonetta Paloscia’s aunt and only later moved by her to La Vigna (Castagno). The tile with the man astride the back was posed on 21 July 1985, in memory of the expedition to Aleppo, with Tommaso Paloscia in the role of a brave leader on a steed.