Reviews

“A young painter, under the age of forty, Gian Rodolfo d’Accardi has gained, with laborious tenacity, a personality of his own. It is perhaps not vast, but is certainly precise enough to be noticed. Sicilian by birth, Milanese by habit, many accents of Lombard painting have been transferred to his palette, together with that romantic side. For example, in his taste for composition, in that abandoned and slightly musical sense of colour, in that sweet reclining of the form upon itself – like flowers bent by the wind – that are among the gifts and character of Lombard painting from the nineteenth century onwards. In the intimate fabric of his painting, d’Accardi can also be said to be a romantic painter, for his subject-matter is the world, spiritual and three-dimensional, in which it is configured as expression. […] The amazement that gives a modern stamp to his concepts is resolved in a human accent. Thus his Horse Rides in the snow, or woods, acquire a pathetic feeling; secret poetry, graceful compositions, distilled between elegance and subtle poetic torments, of a chaste gentleness, resolved pictorially with skill and dignity.
Even the pictorial fact is well possessed and dominated. Thus an important Landscape at twilight can assume a dense tonal strength, rising to the dignity of a three-dimensional language that entrusts in further developments of d’Accardi’s art, already placed in a good light, thanks to its personal notes and its inner core that is human and poetic. This unshackles it from the annoying, vacuous limits of decoration, into a field of constructive values, such as content and form”.

BONARDI, Dino (1941, March 28). Mostre d’Arte. G. R. d’Accardi [Art Exhibitions. G. R. d’Accardi]. La Sera.

“Among the artists we acknowledged at the Quadriennale at Rome for their originality was Gian Rodolfo d’Accardi. […] D’Accardi derives from a youthful expression which is documented by a very autonomous effort to make sense of modern themes. First of all, the artist’s sensitivity and intuitive, veiled intimate style, expressed with sincerity, remain crucial. This sincerity affirms d’Accardi’s evident romantic vision, which grants pre-eminence to dreams, with a light and sometimes fragile lyricism, which possesses the artist’s soul and determines his style and form. At first glance, d’Accardi’s painting seems to interest everyone. It is the art of immediate pleasure, elegant and vivid, which places its interest in motifs of fantasy, initially seeming very polite, but then revealing itself to be of real interest to in-depth critical inquiry.
The painter experiences nature according to his or her visionary manner of interpreting it. In these landscapes, so lyrical and trembling with intimate emotion, everything derives from a delicate vibration of the inspiration which then is firmed up into precise motifs of colour, taste and real construction. The colour is invariably straightforward and nobly chosen, and yet remains consistent by not losing the propensity for lightness, or indeed the ability to be cloudy or opaque. Such taste is particularly notable in his still life works. Several of these may worthily be deemed refined, thanks to the intimate style which moves and expresses these pieces. An example is the piece with the bottle, chandelier, orange and egg: it offers a clear expressive intensity and impedes any values which are not decorative but intimately pictorial. The painter creates a vigorous three-dimensional world in a delicate precision of relationships.
Of course, we can see d’Accardi’s true originality not so much in his pure and simple landscapes, of which there are nevertheless important examples in this exhibition; the originality can be seen in those more complex compositions in which it is as if nature is invaded by elements of another nature, by men or knights, which impose a certain mythical character. Not mythical in the sense of a mythical, earthy poem which pits the human against the gloomy forces of nature understood as an uninhabited entity rejecting the human; rather, mythical in the sense of a light and lyrical dream in which the animal and human world is conditioned by nature in a kind of spiritual fraternity.”

BONARDI, Dino (1943, June 6). Artisti che espongono [Exhibiting artists]. Gian Rodolfo d’Accardi alla Galleria Como [Gian Rodolfo d’Accardi at the Galleria Como]. La Provincia di Como.

“D’Accardi’s studio is on the threshold of the industrial and mercantile suburb of Milan […]. A few days ago, we went to visit our painter to choose the paintings for this exhibition. It had snowed during the night; the city had been white for a few hours. But, when we arrived in the area of his studio, the snow on the tarmac was already muddy brown and the sky had its usual faint and ashy light. D’Accardi began to put the paintings on the easel. In that place, on that day, when we could not have imagined ourselves more adverse to the joy of colour, here was the elucidating, alive, vigorous, lovingly and skillfully modulated song of painting: authentic painting, without adjectives, without isms, which, every time we encounter it, gives us unique emotion, irreplaceable and unmistakable.”

BUDIGNA, Luciano (1960). Solo Exhibition. In Gian Rodolfo d’Accardi. San Babila Artistic Center, Milan.

“To observe the pictorial work of Gian Rodolfo d’Accardi with due attention (perhaps beginning with that first picture of his painted in Milan’s Public Gardens exactly forty years ago, and culminating in the large, vigorous and very fresh paintings of recent months) is to be transported, almost necessarily, to the realm of in-depth consideration. […] Precisely because he remained so long outside cultural discourse (or debate, or general bickering), which also affected him, too, not without painful struggle, and precisely because he stepped back from intellectual and aesthetic combat (or brawl, or riot) in which he could legitimately played an important role, d’Accardi nowadays finds himself in a uniquely privileged position, and can, without neglect or ambiguous revenge, in a peaceful redde rationem, present to the history of art multiple highly valuable documents accumulated over many decades of patient, silent, fervent effort. […]. Thus, to hazard a definition, it could be asserted that d’Accardi’s painting, his poetic message, and the most truthful and secret meaning which moves it and shapes it, is – intentionally, deliberately – an authentic consolation of the “pain of living”.

Of course, every work of art achieves this, but in d’Accardi, this is foremost, or even salient: a group of children encountered by chance on the street returning from a funeral of a close acquaintance, a sudden beautiful scent in a hot and stuffy hour, the unexpectedly kind response to a stupidly rancorous attack.

Not that this is particularly important, or actually means anything; but d’Accardi, getting to know him personally, with his childish, timid and impassioned gaze, that incredibly sweet smile, his apparently compliant manner (yet, behind all this, it is not difficult to see a moral rigour, or even an almost Jansenist toughness, which will never be overcome), offers, within a human dimension, the same sensation that his painting offers in the aesthetic realm.

At this point, we might turn to several comments which, over the course of ten years’ engagement with the painter, has sought to diminish for the writer the debt of gratitude ignited by his work.

At that time there was talk of painting made of light and spaces, of signs and colour, of natural images and imaginative fantasy, of the love of life and the intelligence of the world, even of great patience or long, shrewd experience.

It was said that the offering Gian Rodolfo d’Accardi continues to provide (from the authoritative position of an inexhaustible creative happiness, to the doubts, ambiguities, and torments that hinder the development of so many artistic vocations today) is always that of a very free individual, but also that of an essential relationship with visible nature.

The light enclosed in a painting can become “mental” as long as one wishes (one certainly cannot blame Leonardo); the rendered images can be reduced to the essentiality of signs as long as one likes (why should not Kandinsky or Klee or Kline or Hartung be right?). But the emotion or idea in which the painting is rooted must necessarily be located in a universal reality, if not superficially then intelligibly.”

BUDIGNA, Luciano (1970). Solo Exhibition. In Gian Rodolfo d’Accardi. Mostra Antologica (1930–1970). Cortina Art Gallery, Milan. Milan: by Renzo Cortina – Galleria Cavour–Cortina.

“Colour never stands still in d’Accardi’s paintings, especially in his woods, parks, and gardens. The frequent gallops of the horses under the plants are ultimately superfluous in giving us a sense of life, vibration, trembling, in those vegetative theaters. It seems to me that the definitions of expressionist, neo-“fauvist”, or simply lyrical, are of little importance. The vigor, the stormy impetus of his brushstrokes, of his green counterpoints can be attributed to his southern origin. But the result, the vision offered to us, contains nothing of the south. Even here in Lombardy it is difficult to find trees so imbued with such solemn and humid light. The depth of the vegetative caves, the arboreal architecture, the freshness of its high foliage, the metamorphosis of the rays in the intricacy of branches and leaves, are not described through a precise design but result from the interplay of chromatic blocks, which mix and intersect intrepidly, giving precisely that vital sensation that is d’Accardi’s best feature. This feverish language of his is not only suited to woods. One also notices flowers that are just as nervous and well articulated; a happy winter landscape glistening with icy snow, which is among the most beautiful; a Grand Canal dominated by a glorious palpitating sky; and a resounding vortex of pigeons in front of San Marco, where the artist has put all his machine guns into action.”

d. b. (BUZZATI, Dino) (1970, June 11). Mostre d’Arte [Art Exhibitions]. Gian Rodolfo d’Accardi. Corriere della Sera.

“D’Accardi finds his primary language in colour, and he uses it with a varied and always balanced taste as if renewing the range of his palette each time, preserving and even refining his secret virtue of the harmony of aerial perspectives. D’Accardi cares little for the appearance, for example, of the landscapes he discovers as he travels through the Lombard countryside. If anything, he will take cues rather than notes; if anything, he will accept the lesson of balance and harmony that nature offers him. But only in memory will he find the lines, the volumes that best serve to give body to his colours; only in memory will he feel that emotional atmosphere of his that he will recapture in the work where details of reality are absorbed into a complete and inseparable vision. In such an inspiration, wholly contained in unity and precisely in the centripetal possibility of art that it offers, d’Accardi can now better evoke the pictorial images of his fresh palette. Thus colour sings on the canvas with accents of novelty, with musical vibrations, and the shapes and features come out of his memory with a season of grace and are recomposed in the work as in a fairytale.”

CERUTI, Carlo (1939). Mostre Romane [Roman Exhibitions]. D’Accardi – Cappello da Bragaglia. In Meridiano di Roma.

“A peculiar feature of Gian Rodolfo d’Accardi’s art is to be immersed in the atmosphere of a dream, or light and colour expanded or thickened in the shivers of an “aura”, which is not the heavy “aura” that man breathes, but is crystalline – the purest breath of distances where only the spirit lands – that vibrates and moves in the auroral freshness of myths, of supernatural events. Within, lines do not markedly delineate things that are well-defined and customary to our daily experience. They are modulated – musical signs too – in essential harmonies of light and colour.

Lyrical transfiguration. Values that are more spiritual than technical: pathos emerges and radiates – in untranslatable rhythms – to the confusion of calculation. It is natural, therefore, that the iconography here does not have exact and real comparisons, but appears as an instinctive transposition, anything but calculated, of material elements in spirituality. The thought that is translated into modern painting has no reference to the exterior world; it is all in the movements and visions of an interior life. D’Accardi brings into this painting the secret novelty of his chromatic language rich in transitions and tones and gradations.

The greens (of which there are so many in his paintings), the red-browns, the shimmering whites veiled in iridescence, the yellows, the blues, and all the unknown mixtures throb, sing, illuminate themselves in a sonorous climate among the pauses of a vegetal silence; they compose themselves, envelop themselves, dissolve themselves in the festive elegance of images born as pictorial motives and not as subjects.

In d’Accardi, colour is sometimes an exclamation point; that is, a note of chromatic wonder that accentuates – in the need to express the most subtle shifts of his own emotion – the initial motif of the painting, thus communicating a more exalted temperament to the chromatic, three-dimensional language of his compositions. This is the resolution of his painting, which is never empirical.

And it is his virtue to deepen his “pictorial feeling” in the secret of the passages – through the medium of juicy brushstrokes traversed by the maturation of rich and pulpy fruits, warm as a youthful blood – which only tends to the purest values of painting, so that there is no deafness whatsoever within his canvas. Form (this terrible presence of things!) is created by colour and in colour, taking from this three-dimensional emphasis and giving it body.

In him, the vision of a lyrical world that has no relationship to ours is evident. He sees free horses in their vegetative paradises, amazons at a convention, whimsical rides of legendary characters around unnamed lakes and through remote woods (in which one would seek in vain for a worldly and temporal reference). Their land is not the same as the one where man lives out his mortal days devoted to the great and small cares of existence; they come from distant places.

This is not enough. These horse rides, these variations upon the same theme, cannot give the viewer the impression of something identical replicated on purpose, precisely because of an intrinsic spiritual virtue. The painter contemplates them within himself; he feels them present in his undeciphered memories. From time to time he recreates them from his inner vision upon the canvas; not as they would appear to him in a mundane encounter, but as he dreams them upon the surreal background of his own emotions, with other appearances and other rhythms, without the need for models or to resort to taking notes and sketches of original performances. These works are born, in short, from within, and therefore assume a vitality that would be lost had he portrayed the scenes from life, landscapes and figures. The painter does nothing but imagine, and his brush recreates the forms and perspectives according to an intimate urgency to manifest, in colour and light, his own moved abstractions, where the soul is wholly recalled. So much happiness! In these paintings, he “frees himself”. At last, he is made to find the environment and the climate where he can forget, stretching in eternity.”

CERUTI, Carlo (1942). D’Accardi: monografia. Modena: Guanda Editore.

“We love all painters, as long as they are – and this is not often the case – artists: those who repeatedly beat on the canvas believing to be creating something precise, and those who, instead of stopping at the specific, abandon themselves to rhythm. Abandonment can lead to losing one’s way, but obstinate fine-tuning can make one blind. Every way of life has its dangers, but rhythm can serve as Ariadne’s thread for the creation of unimaginable labyrinths.

This thread has caught d’Accardi who, ever since he began to paint, continually wanders through the woods of dreams among mysterious horse rides.

No one wants to suggest that he pursues the same theme. Neither horses nor men nor shells are exhausted in one or five paintings. D’Accardi does not revise the same horses; he continues to live in the same atmosphere.

But to speak of a dream is also a misunderstanding. D’Accardi’s painting does not play on escape; unfortunately we now speak of escape that does not even have the merit of that of the coerced, adventurous and reckless, but only of pretexts instead of literary evasions, of new rhetoric.

D’Accardi’s painting darkens his canvas with tall tree trunks that close the sky; they weave saturated tones of green. The rapid trunks sometimes glitter like serpents inside the dense curtain of thick green. Below, open space always broadens – a river bank, the circle of a lake or of a track. And the bright, brown horses line up and cross each other; small, nervous, restless souls. Rarely does the sky appear above, although couples of men and women wander amid the low forests. It is as if he were entering another circle. The relationship between the dimensions of men and trees, of horses and the sky, have also become different. These little horses are in a landscape of trees without leaves. Underneath is snow, above is a gloomy sky, and the three little horses have drawn close like souls that perceive the beating of time in the world; they are at the center of the universe. The dialogue assumes mythical value.

He continually seeks the refinement of sensitivity. Even if he paints the figure of a woman or a still life, he seeks paths of sensitive language. And even if the painter writes (Approdi [Awakenings]):

In the far-off distance I remember no more
and dreamily awaken
Down woody slopes I meet
upright pine trees hoping
for ancient happiness.
Nights in absence
have stolen flowers.
Now, in forgetfulness
leaves from the meadows,
one upon another, weary.
Sorrow at a dull pace.
I remember no more
and seek likenesses
in rain-sodden chimneys.

Even the chord of his poetic emotion justifies the accent of his painting.”

GIOLLI, Raffaello (1939). Solo Exhibition. In Gian Rodolfo d’Accardi in una in una mostra nelle nostre sale: catalogue of works. Galleria d’Arte Genova, Genova.

“One of d’Accardi’s main merits is precisely that of knowing how to bear the object he represents towards that lyrical and colouristic kindling which is his own. Whether he represents horses alone and abandoned in the autumn woods, or whether he places fish or acrobats in his canvases, his forms, regardless, seem to only be props and indications, which must prepare us for those sweet melodies of colour that quiver in him in spite of himself.

What seems to be the living center of d’Accardi’s work, and which appears evident in some of the skillfully orchestrated backgrounds of his still lifes, are certain colour combinations arranged in such a way as to create a lyrical continuity between the objects he represents; trees, human figures, and animals thus become notes and chords of a very sweet melody.

D’Accardi does not attack the objects of the visible world as if he wished to extract from each a dense and compact volume. Rather, he wishes to make us feel the force of expansion of the objects of the natural world, above all entrusting colour with the task of revealing their forms to us.

A poet of melancholy autumns that seem to descend on the meadows from the heights of trees laden with withered leaves, he reveals to us nature saturated with memories and regrets. His rusty trees sometimes appear more human and familiar than the characters and horses that wander among them.

When d’Accardi reconsiders well-known motifs of contemporary painting – his acrobats are the offspring of those of Cézanne and Picasso – he still only obeys his inspiration. And that withered sweetness, which like a lyrical wave crosses the silhouettes of the acrobats at work or dreaming, is similar to that which quivers in the leaves of his autumn trees.

The life of art is similar, after all, to a great symphony which encompasses everything: imperious trumpet blasts, majestic adagios, overwhelming joy, dark final chords; but there are also sweet phrases that enchant like the sighs of a soul.

D’Accardi is like a sweet and unique musical phrase – the melancholy sigh of a soul.”

KAISSERLIAN Giorgio (1955). Solo Exhibition. In d’Accardi. Mostra Antologica (opere datate 1950–1955). S. Fedele Art Gallery, Milan.

“I have been familiar with Gian Rodolfo d’Accardi’s paintings for many years. Precisely for this reason and because I know its development – as I have known him for a long time and I am a good friend of his, because he is a dear person – I should be more willing to observe it with a certain detachment rather than be seduced by it. All the more so because I am, for better or worse, a critic.

Vice versa, when I look at d’Accardi’s paintings, I am not tempted at all to analyze them. Not because they do not deserve in-depth examination, but because I like them (perhaps some more than others, but I like them) and I establish such an immediate communication with them that it bothers me to interrupt my conversation with them for philological, aesthetic or technical exercises. I understand that this is a dangerous position and that perhaps I risk appearing simple-minded. But on the other hand, d’Accardi’s painting springs forth so naturally and unified that I have the secret conviction of adding nothing to my pleasure in standing there with scales to measure its merits – of which there are many – and its defects – of which there are few. This art, on the other hand, has the good fortune, so rare in our hermetic and confused times, of being completely evident, even in its mysterious and imaginary aura, and clear in its sentiments, inventions and expressive methods. The fact is that d’Accardi goes into his painting wholly as he is. With his romantically fiery temperament, imaginative, sensual, but also tender and nostalgic, but also cultured and refined. Cultured to the point where there is no temptation to flaunt culture or intellect (but one perceives that his intellect, well nourished with knowledge, makes its choices spontaneously and regulates instinct without opinion, whilst letting it gallop); refined to the point where certain things are not avoided, but with a touch, a nuance, a nonchalance, impetus, roughness, exuberance, and sensuality are appreciated, ennobled, harmonized, without clashing with what is delicate and precious overall, enhancing it. […]

Art today is often tempestuous and symphonically explained, with a “breath” that never fails to move from one end of the canvas to the other, on large surfaces. But when limiting itself to smaller dimensions, it does not weaken, gathering and calming itself in meditation, lyricism and intensity. It is art that is the mature fruit of long and passionate labor, of frank pictorial talent, which has never followed the fashions and has always been able to be of its time. Finally, it is art that is substantiated by its ability to compose poetry with the fervent abandonment of feeling, alacrity of imagination and living expressive force.”

LEPORE, Mario (ed.). (1965). Solo Exhibition. In d’Accardi: notebook of works. Art Gallery S. Maria di Piazza, Busto Arsizio. Milan: Tipografia Giuseppe Muggiani.

“For more than thirty years he has dreamed of wild foals in the imaginary woods of his imagination; he has always imagined (on the wave of the last Rouault’s circus rhythm or a Schoenbergian cadence) “Pierrots lunaires” watching a night concert intently. These are the contrasting conditions of his life; on the one hand, impossible freedom, and, on the other, bitter recitation to survive in a world which does not respect man. It is worth clarifying, at this point, that d’Accardi exists happily in his world, in an non-arrogant manner; on the contrary, he rewards others with his bright colours and makes them partakers of the festive joy of his vision. All of this, as ever, is achieved with exemplary spiritual coherence, which one can note if one examines the trajectory of his artistic life.

Only forty years ago, and barely nineteen, he came from his native Sicily to Milan, and immediately his curious, lively and highly mobile eye identified the most current pictorial trends of the moment. […]

[D’Accardi] could not help but be affected and enthused by those expressive novelties, whilst also establishing particular premises of his own personality, which would turn, deep down, to warmer blends, to more lively tonal relationships, to formal networks denser in mood. His Mediterranean character was already superimposing itself onto the architectural abilities of the Northern painters.

Over his first decade, his painting thus matured in this cocoon, curiously independent yet also formally linked to the two opposites of chiarism and certain more stark material definitions of the first “Corrente” period. His was a world of simultaneously quivering and poignant nostalgia, marked by an ever growing need to plunge into the sensations created by colour, to reach a definition of form with burning rapidity before it was extinguished in the visionary dream that created it.

Obviously, with these premises, once his technique matured and adapted to his expressive needs, d’Accardi would come to a more instinctive form of painting: this has occurred over approximately the last fifteen years, as he now paints works of purer colours, of more ardent combinations, or highly sensitive narrative fluency. Of course, even in this latest evolution and successful expression of his personality, d’Accardi has remained surprisingly faithful to the poetic substance of his past world; faithful to its themes and, above all, to its clean truth of colour; and just as in his youth some paintings were idyllic and others stormy, some “tonal” and others defined by instinstice rapidity, so today we can see both large scale compositions with an evident expressive urgency, in which lines lead to peremptory and violent spaces, and also tender and dreamy tonal landscapes, capable of evoking solitude and tangible silence, in which one can breathe better and almost touch life.”

MASCHERPA, Giorgio (1965). Solo Exhibition. In d’Accardi: notebook of works. Pro Padua Art Gallery, Padua. Milan: Tipografia Scotti.

“Very young. G. R. d’Accardi had reached his third “solo” exhibition, after having participated in the third and fourth union exhibitions in Turin, in the Florence and Montecatini Exhibitions in 1931, and in many other minor events. Sicilian, from Palermo, he has been in Milan since he was a child and the landscapes he paints are all Milanese suburbs, especially P. Vigentina and Lambrate; the “Ambrosian” countryside to which the Lambro river bestows corners of poetry and splendour, which few people down here are familiar with. D’Accardi has “discovered” them and loves them, and lingers willingly to portray them, with his wise and shrewd brushstroke, with his fresh and rich use of colour, with his “particular” mode of painting that, in only a few centimetres of the painting, succeeds in capturing an endless landscape, which acts as the immense background that, beyond the trees, beyond the houses and bell towers, beyond the fog and the rain, reveals itself before the eye, and which knows how to penetrate and investigate. And those skies! And those horizons! Every “hour”, every “moment”, a new range, a new interpretation, a delightful reverie of tone and colour, overall always full of effectiveness and pleasure. […] The possibilities of d’Accardi are also clearly indicated in the two or three essays of figures, especially in The reader, and in Flowers, where even the seductive poetry that tempts the very young painter boasts his spiritual collaboration  – always precious  – that art must not only be an experiment and search for “form”, and fantasy and whim, but the essence and power of life, in sincerity of “spirits”. The “verse that does not create”, in short, applied to the painting and the statue, is the “verse” that d’Accardi, and many others, do not like.”

g. m. (MUSSIO, Giovanni) (1933). Presentazione. In Mostra personale di Gian Rodolfo d’Accardi: catalogue of works. Casa d’artisti, Milan.

“Gian Rodolfo d’Accardi, from Palermo, moved to our part of Italy when he was still an infant. Today, in his forties, in full fervour of life and work between Cernobbio and Milan, he confirms with this drawing – which he calls a confession of a serene moment, without needless acrobatics or effects – the right he has long earned: to abandon himself, when he paints, to the freest, but never carefree, fantasy. This is so typical of certain of his very subtle taste compositions, between the fairy-tale and the scenographic, the comedy of men and things, or the flicker of multicoloured steeds in tune, at the margins of reality, above more serene hints of the throbbing poetic transfiguration of nature.”

NEBBIA, Ugo (1950, January 19). Bianco e nero del giovedì [Black and White of Thursday]. Il Tempo di Milano.

“Dear d’Accardi,

I do not wish to offer to you one of the usual preambles at the start of the exhibition, for which you have finally decided to emerge a little from your industrious solitude. Of course, this does not mean that I am no longer content to act as one of your most convinced guarantors, or, less still, that I do not wish to take advantage of such a favourable opportunity to make my point in the increasingly troubled sea of modern day painting. It simply means that I have so much confidence in the clarity of your renewed conversation with people today, that I believe that certain discursive encumbrances are more useless than ever, seen how, rather than offering favor, these often risk violating the sympathy that the expressive frankness of an affable and serene pictorial discourse like yours deserves. In short, I am not seeking a loophole if I limit myself to remembering, in this up-front manner, to what extent I find you consistent with the intimate poetry of your happy artist temperament: that is, to those healthy abandonments of feeling and fantasy that could not better define it; to what comes from it so directly, for that instinctive sensitivity of yours, that experience has increasingly refined from the tonal and compositional, allowing the most frank and whimsical formal independence, without however ever dispersing it in some wandering intellectualism. In short, one can always understand oneself with you, not to mention reassure oneself in the dangerous chaos that surrounds us, of which art seems to offer the most worrying symptoms.

The fact that there is still a chance of salvation on the issues on which you resist so well, without giving in to the snare of mimicry or digression, is ever shown by the freedom of your open pictorial language, the contained fluidity of your strokes, void of malice or forced expression; the return to some of your typical motifs, where forms of fairy tale often so openly match the enchantment of your landscapes; your poetic manner of escaping from reality by filtering its intimate essence; that cordial, almost good-natured way of unequivocally revealing a world of your own, where shape and colour palpitate with an unmistakable harmony no less yours: in short, all this teaches us that the world of intelligible painting is not entirely lost amidst the dangerous, albeit fascinating, premises of the atomic era in art.

I said salvation; though I concede how resistance becomes increasingly felt beyond a certain point, and how it can be almost reckless to claim that the poetic tenderness of artists such as you can still remain a good guide against further dispersions. Allow me, then, to call to mind here the intelligent portent offered about you by the deceased dear Raffaello Giolli, whose memory has never felt as proximate as now, like a conscience forever lost.

Let us therefore remain thus, in the good faith you have long awakened in us. Let us remain thus; if nothing else, because we know very well that you will certainly not be soon hosting another “evening”, in which you explain, or have us explain, how we should now think about the art of today and tomorrow, given your unique ability to make us feel, and indeed see, what your heart is telling you. I repeat, let us remain thus: even if only for the faith that continues to enlighten you on the difficult path you continue to follow.

Let us agree, I say, and understand each other, without the usual trickery of words. This is a kind of wish, in short, which I offer you, as I do to anyone who continues to believe in the blissful illusion of art.

Yours, Ugo Nebbia.”

NEBBIA, Ugo (1951). Solo Exhibition. In d’Accardi: notebook of works. S. Fedele Art Gallery, Milan. Milan: Tipografia Ghirarduzzi.

“A firm and uncontaminated artist, like a rock that overcomes the wear of time and the strength of the elements. Almost all spiritual movements are represented in d’Accardi’s art. He remains indifferent to the modernists at all costs. His painting is the result of his will and his deep moral conscience which, urged by the spirit, weaves a pictorial discourse of truth, freedom, vivifying and intoxicating light which he knows how to translate onto the canvas; an ideal of illuminating creative synthesis; a poetic discourse that embraces art, culture and lyricism projected into an ensemble of arcane melodies revealed by its multiform restful lyrical colours, vibrant with a solar spirit. In each of his works, D’Accardi reveals the harmonies of his Sicilian homeland with heartfelt reminiscence. He loves simplicity, and with clear nostalgia he carries in his heart the eternal floating of the Sicilian waters, with the Charybdis vortex and the rock of Scylla carved into his meditative gaze.

Through his canvases one can perceive the emotions aroused in him by the memories and the infinite artistic and cultural experiences that took place in his native land; which, like a wreath of vermilion flowers, float on the marvelous blue waters of three seas consecrated by that Mediterranean civilization founded on a triad of universal values: Greek – Latin – Arab.

D’Accardi’s work as a whole is a colossal, evocative corpus. The painting The Battle is influenced by the legend of the Cyclops, by the chivalrous deeds of romanticism that persist in a chimerical dream, arousing the burning satire of Cervantes. He compares different worlds. A man from Arcadia rushing on horseback towards sacrifice, pompously and humorously entering the farcical adventure of the infamous Gano of Mainz, with the hero of Roncaesvalles and Lancelot exalted as eternal characters and defenders of great ideals. In the play of colours in the painting Landscape, reflected in the wooded arch dear to the Dryad nymphs, he highlights a gentle fusion and fluctuation of light, and seems to offer the charm of the poet of pain, a mix of the delicate pallor of “La Ginestra” and the immensity of “The Infinite”. His Morandian-style flowers have a metaphysical and restful appearance. The beauty of nature satisfies his spirit but shuns such immediacy and increasingly engages in the search for reasons.

Although in some of his works he does not take into account certain traditions, he does not fall into Dadaism. An instinctive force of lyrical and cultural power emerges in him that suggests he harbours an innate culture favored by distant reminiscences: his Sicily is his theater. He has a strong Christian personality, albeit with some eclectic streaks. He gracefully includes expressionistic veins in his work, highlighting a free expression of his inner world which cannot be seen as self-centered, but rather as a harmonic expression of a moral world that points to a transcendent truth. His symbolism is not that of the Frenchman Gauguin, which pushed towards the most unbridled, unlimited, symbolist freedom. With his soft, delicate, almost ancestral symbolic hints, he expresses himself on the basis of his precise state of mind, with a polite moral logic, in a fluorescence of discursive colours exemplified by his “Conca d’oro”; fragmenting the impassivity of the work of art without resorting to Mallarmé, Keats or the transpositions of poetic motifs a la Schlegel. Because d’Accardi is also a poet. He does not follow any current, but his intimate feeling, which smacks of Christian universalism, is clear in his paintings, albeit mysterious and fantastic. This is how he, in an outpouring of reality and fantasy, frames and expresses the ideal form of nature by harmonizing the visible and the invisible. D’Accardi’s constant search is a drama that finds its primary source in his moral imperturbability.

PANTALEO, Biagio (1972, November 5). Luce e poesia nella pittura di d’Accardi [Light and poetry in d’Accardi’s painting]. L’Ordine.

“Gian Rodolfo d’Accardi — The New York Cultural Center, 2 Columbus Circle, through Nov. 28. Lyrical vibrations emanate from the paintings of this Milan painter, whose reputation on the Continent has caused him to be included with exhibits of masters such as Picasso, Matisse and others of such calibre. Now d’Accardi is creating a similar place for himself in New York with this exhibit.

Using wide and short brush strokes, coupled with a palette that paints the wind and the atmosphere as well as his beloved horses and forests, he conveys a joyousness, a vitality that involves the viewer completely.

All his paintings pulsate with movement, sometimes diffused, other times direct, giving them an immediacy that is most attractive. Some of the work is semi–abstract, particularly those of forests, where the tree trunks become enmeshed with one another in abstract patterns.

He is a man who loves life and paints it accordingly.”

PARIS, Jeanne (1971). Gian Rodolfo d’Accardi. Long Island Press. Sunday Edition.

“Dreamlike clouds [drift together] from distant journeys / to the spring landing of girls on the shore / of the lake”

D’Accardi himself offers us this proclamation, perhaps without even fully remembering that he is its author (“over distances I no longer remember”).

Those girls disembark, around 1939, in the Bathing of the Amazons, a piece which could be seen as a sort of fascinating synopsis of the painting style which, in those years, d’Accardi was entirely committed to pouring out.

A fading of tender, dark, brilliant greens, which form the thick curtain of the forest, broken by the whites and blacks of the horses, a flowering of blues and pinks and blondes: the girls bathing or resting on the jade lawn, a lean, punctual painting, without smudges or thicknesses of matter. […]

This is still the time when d’Accardi is chasing his sweet, vaguely georgic legend: woods, moors, skies and horses. Black and white ponies, nervous, sensitive and kind, from a chess game, or from Andersen’s fairy tales.

This painting, Giolli realized, could almost be regarded as an icastic transposition of d’Accardi’s poetry. Indeed, it has the same lyrical vibration, variously expressed in the composition of sounds or rhythmically equal colours. On the lovingly painted trees of the woo, incredible woods imbued with a humid of stars, “another sun will come / to flood them with leaves / and they will become shadows / fresh for the quiet cooing of the doves.”

And “another sun” has come, other leaves have grown, but not to form an forgetful blanket of dreams, a garden of musical silences, an idyllic shady recess. We could say that d’Accardi, in his most recent work, has forgotten once again: forgotten to forget.

Blood, which has become denser and richer over the years, seems to have flowed more impetuously, swirling into this new painting, which retains the modesty and frankness of the old, but has equally not lost its weary abandonment and diaphanous pallor. Some themes return: landscapes, snow, horses, figures.

The watchful sense of a controlled, carefully calculated and balanced composition still holds true in his writing. But chords of a deeper register have suddenly offered up a vigor that was previously unknown and now seems to be exalted, to the point of baroque fury, in a lively and animated fabric of counterpoints, tones and controtones, of dissonances and rhythms, with darkly intense and disturbed vivacity.

The references which tempt us are higher brow and more distant than they were in the past, and yet they remain as precise.

The drama of the Crucifixion (Wise collection), in ’57, lights up exquisite archaic reminiscences that are resolved in authentically personal accents, accents that seem to subside in the arcanely elementary majesty of the second Crucifixion (’62 -’63). If the Concert of ’62, with vague ensorian consonances, and the beautiful Palio of ’63 fall within the painter’s most typical vein, it may also seem that secret and subconscious suggestions from Paolo Uccello – transliterating and praising themselves in the Horse Ride of ’62 and the Battle of ’63 – offer the most stimulating fulcrum to the lever of pictorial action. “

PICA, Agnoldomenico (edited by). (1963). D’Accardi: monografia. Milan: Studio Marina Edizioni in Milan.

“Among the very young, of excellent promise, is d’Accardi, with his paintings traversed by spectrums of colour, more than just by colour alone. He too has an acute, extreme, and I would say flayed sensitivity, which shudders at the slightest touch. He will benefit a lot from studying the real, though it may be tiring and unrewarding, in which his imagination finds legitimacy: but he will certainly make his way.”

PIOVENE, Guido (1939, April 13). La mostra dei premi dell’Accademia di Brera [Exhibition of the awards of the Brera Academy]. Corriere della Sera.

“Having matured through a full experience of colour, which grants him a simultaneously full-bodied and feathery brushstroke, and masterful glazes that overlap as in a prestigious game, d’Accardi has returned to his island to tell us about his lyrical adventures in contact with the intense breath of woods, his fairy tales with vague mythological flavor and, ultimately, his deep love for nature.”

Vice (PIOVENE, Guido) (1974, February 20). Piccola Galleria. D’Accardi. La Sicilia.

“For my wedding (I am talking about twenty years ago), I received a gift from Milan of a painting by d’Accardi. At that time, I must confess, the painter was completely unknown to me. It depicted, or rather depicts (because the painting still hangs on the wall of my apartment), a concert of clowns: two shy and chalky pulcinella and a harlequin and a little man in black, with a bowler hat and a stringy, yellow trumpet, against the background of a few carriages from a modest suburban circus. And the sky is halfway between purple and blue, which seems to prelude rain. And although the colour tones are muted, and the whole composition lacks the cheerfulness of that canvas, I was struck by a kind of hidden solar and Mediterranean vitality and, at the same time, by the need to affirm, and reaffirm, the necessity of certain values  – human commitment, for example, and the presence of the fable, the need for fantasy – that in these years seem to be competing to neglect and destroy.

Then, in Milan, I often happened to come across other works by d’Accardi in the homes of friends or collectors: still little concerts but, more often, landscapes, or flowers, and above all little horses; little foals often ridden by equally tiny riders that sometimes look like centaurs. We don’t know if they are more lost (like Little Thumb and his brothers) in thick forests of tall and soaring trees (an emblem of our existential condition?) or marching boldly towards the conquest of some mysterious treasure.

Thus I ended up becoming familiar with Gian Rodolfo d’Accardi […]. The sign of d’Accardi is not a tormented sign, but it is the sign and result of torment. In him, therefore, colour is never improvised, never seen “before”, but is meditated, searched and achieved every time through the conquest of language and composition that so greatly and so completely obeys the artist’s figurative intentions that it conceals itself completely behind and inside that particular luminosity – and I would add the musicality – of his compositions. It is, therefore, better not to be deceived or misled by that joyful explosion of chromatic chords that vibrates in his palette and sometimes makes one think of the Fauves. It is rather the sign of nostalgia and an almost tangible need to attain form; transfiguring it and even consuming it on the canvas before it dissolves on its own into the visionary dream that provoked it. This is why Guido Piovene wrote that his paintings seem to be “traversed by spectrums of colour,  more than just by colour alone”, and spoke of an “acute, extreme, I would say flayed sensitivity, which shudders at the slightest touch.”

These words were spoken several years ago, but they are also appropriate to Gian Rodolfo d’Accardi’s at this present moment. They are the proof and the index of the extraordinary coherence of an artist who, whilst refining and deepening – as is natural – his instinctive personality during the course of the various seasons – from the tonal experiences of his early period, to his subsequent research into colour, and to the more recent indications of his move in the direction of subject-matter and graphic art –  has always remained faithful to the call of his inner voice.”

PRISCO, Michele (1973). Presentazione. In d’Accardi: notebook of works. Galleria d’Arte Schettini Editore, Naples. Milan: Tipografia Scotti.

“He is young and absolutely self-taught. For about two years he has devoted himself to painting and has already managed to put together a considerable number of essays that reveal his torment and passion for art. In Milan, where he resides, d’Accardi – Sicilian by origin and birth – is already highly regarded, and now, exhibiting in Rome, he wants to establish himself as a promise that will not fail to do justice to his signature.

Those who have visited his solo exhibition, held on the premises of the “Abruzzese-Molise Family”, at Corso Umberto I n. 300, have easily understood that this is not the usual exhibition of a painter who exhibits with the hope of making money, but the presentation of an artist who has not yet decided the road he must take because he has so many good ones before him, but who has all the qualities necessary to continue upon the path he has begun.

The main merit of d’Accardi’s painting is the sincerity that rarely hides the naive expression of an honest novice, so appreciated in art; that is, no technical skill, nor intention to follow this or that come to hinder the soul’s free expression, nor to disturb the correct and simple formation of his personality.

Nature as it is, without stylistic or even programmatic concerns. This is what prevails when our landscape painter paints, and with this he is able to place clear emphasis upon his sensitive and poetic temperament.”

P. S. (SCARPA, Piero) (1931, November, 29). Gian Rodolfo d’Accardi. Il Messaggero.

“Although d’Accardi is by nature a romantic, he knows how to restrain himself at the right moment. The accentuated lyricism of his palette succeeds in agreeing with the raw realism, tempering and enhancing the tones that might be desired if the spirit were not to dominate the brain when the search for effect usually pushes the artist involuntarily towards trickery. But there is really no trick here, nor talk of any expertise. Sincerity, passion, emotionality and taste have a way of exerting their influence, so that the subject-matter of the work of art only represents the artist’s state of mind, who considers the landscape, the view, still life not as a set of realistic and three-dimensional elements, but as chromatic harmony, which, developing sweet harmonies, spreads in the vastness of space, offering a succession of very pleasant sensations.”

P. S. (SCARPA, Piero) (1938, December 31). Artisti che espongono [Exhibiting artists]. Il Messaggero.

“With this fundamental approach, which eliminates any primitive residue of chiaroscuro, the artist, of Sicilian origin and thus particularly sensitive to the sudden and clear streaks of bright polychromy of his region, builds his bold and balanced language. It may be said that d’Accardi achieves the discovery of the beauty of pure colour by instinct, and that no superstructure can disrupt his fascinating adventure.

Yet there is something particularly significant to be found in his work: the harmonic fusion of timbral colour with the broader atmosphere.

This achievement, which gradually becomes clearer, finds complete definition and coincides with the maturation of the artist when – a rather rare example – the increased intensity of the colour corresponds to a more incisive presence of the environment.

A brief retrospective glance, embracing d’Accardi’s fruitful operative seasons – from the early tonal experiences, to the subsequent research in colour, to the most recent investigations into matter and graphics – easily reveals a constant narrative informing and characterizing the entirety of the painter’s work.

His horses, which, in modern iconography, perfectly capture the slender nervousness of differentiating synthesis, fit into the vast thematic repertoire of the artist pre-1940. And so, too, with the amazons, the knights in playful reconnaissance through the shady woods, and the forests dense with spring moods; and the battles, which in their indefinite realistic notation evoke the spirit, rather than the visual elements of an epic situation. They could also appear as a pretext for compositional rhythms, dynamic elegance and chromatic counterpoints; yet the allusion to ancient concepts of courage and loyalty, and the broader freedom of horses fleeing on the snow or across arid plains, does not appear extraneous to us. We must also note the feeling of religiosity that permeates d’Accardi’s creations, more evident in the dry and vibrant sacred compositions, but still present in those glimpses of aesthetic nature, in the passage of time measured by the fading of light.

And let us return to the protagonist of this unique artistic story. Even d’Accardi’s blacks and whites are used as a function of colour (Cesare Tallone affirmed that they were the two most difficult colours) alongside the varied notes of a particularly rich palette, in which up to sixteen to eighteen shades of green can be counted.

Sometimes it seems that d’Accardi draws with the brush in the Greek manner, with an essentiality of stroke and a reductive enthusiasm that verges on abstraction.

I do not believe, despite today’s misunderstandings and confusion, that a painter can aspire to a greater title than the one that the great Arturo Martini attributed to d’Accardi while visiting one of his personal exhibitions in Milan in 1939: “I love you because you are a poet”. After more than thirty years, that judgement is more valid than ever, because the lyricism that pervades d’Accardi’s painting – one of the most prestigious colourists of our time – is an inherent fact, and intimately connected to his creative happiness.”

TRAVERSI, Gino (ed). (1972). Solo Exhibition. In d’Accardi: catalogue of works. Bambaia Art Gallery, Busto Arsizio. Milan: Tipografia Scotti.

“An exhibition of Gian Rodolfo d’Accardi’s work, an artist who has been on the cutting edge for forty years, is always an interesting and pleasant occasion, if only to ascertain the continuity of an admirably fresh and vigorous language. D’Accardi is one of the few painters of his generation – and of the following ones – who has never shied away from the verification of values while leaving the widest possible scope for imagination, for the fermenting subjectivism that characterizes his cordially communicative work.

This is the first time that the Sicilian Milanese artist has ordered, despite his interest in chalcographic techniques, an individual exhibition of his graphic art. But in 1937 – when the galleries in Milan could be counted in one hand – we found him at the II International Black and White Exhibition, organized by the Italian-Romanian Artistic Circle, along with, among others, Picasso, Braque, Rouault, Derain, De Vlaminck, Denis and the other Italians Breveglieri, de Chirico, Italo Valente and Salvatore Fiume.

D’Accardi has always considered drawing as something autonomous and the revealing expression of his most intimate and secret impulses.

His motion, fast and lean, now unfolds continuously with a curvilinear trend; it is now paused and articulated by the clear contours of a single line.

The exhibition opens with an etching, dated 1937 (Little Head of a Woman), and presents a series of those typical compositions “of the subtlest taste” – as Nebbia wrote in 1950 about d’Accardi’s graphic art – “between the fairy-tale and the scenographic, the comedy of men and things, or the flicker of multicoloured steeds in tune, at the margins of reality, above more serene hints of the throbbing poetic transfiguration of nature.”

A reflection, therefore, of his pictorial world, which reveals the emotional state of the artist in the creative moment; his following the motion of his hand, nervous and rigorous, up to the tangle of lines from which the desired image will emerge as an unexpected vision.

Dry language, but not devoid of seduction for its rare balance and lyrical breath that distinguishes it.”

TRAVERSI, Gino (1973). Solo Exhibition. In Gian Rodolfo d’Accardi. Biblioteca Comunale Palazzo Sormani, Milan. Milan: Tipografia Scotti.

“Gian Rodolfo d’Accardi, a well-known painter of Palermo origin but Milanese by adoption, exhibits at the Alexandria Gallery. It would be useless to recount the whole of his very considerable historical-artistic journey, which would take up many pages; we will therefore limit ourselves to some observations and immediate impressions. It seems clear to us that the climate in which these works are born and evolve is that of a recovery, deeply felt, of freedom, of space, of an environment made on a human scale. In all the canvases exhibited, a natural world appears that seems almost renewed by a cosmic and total palingenesis, of lush horizons of woods in which horses, vital signs of a planet that can still be inhabited, appear as suspended formal presences, like shadows of pure colour. In this nature evoked by force of magic, man appears fleetingly as a complementary presence to the animals, an evanescent presence that manifests itself as a prodigy. In this space, the figures of the horses and riders appear transparent and immersed in the soft light of a gothic fairy tale. The intense and shiny colours, almost like an inlay of semi-precious stones, which have been chosen paying attention only to a law of decorative harmony that does not take into account the relationship with reality, thus accentuate an effect of enchanted abstraction. In almost all these paintings, large trees form a transparent curtain that acts as an intermediary plane between the foreground and the depth of the intense, serene skies. The illuminated and shadowed sections are achieved by the juxtaposition of soothing tones; although in the tonal relationship one perceives above all a relationship of chiaroscuro attentive to the higher, timbral notes of colour. The depth of space is resolved in the surface of the painting, and through the sparse and arabesque diaphragm of the trees the gaze is able to penetrate towards evocative poetic distances that remind us of the “scapigliatura lombarda”. Thus the figures that animate these canvases are immersed in an allusive and thrilling dimension, animated by long and humble silences, broken only by dense lesions of light that flood and nourish things. In all this there is an air of elegy and of profound regret for friendly nature, pregnant with sweetness, which should give us the perception of a haven and not of a tomb as is often the case today. It seems to us that d’Accardi, in these works, aims at the transfiguration of nature that passes first through the demolition of the violent spatula of colour, in order to be able to reconstruct it lyrically in all its exciting structures and nuances.”

VESCOVO, Marisa (1972, November 25). Gli sfrenati puledri della fantasia di d’Accardi [The unbridled foals of d’Accardi’s imagination]. Il Piccolo.

“Ce jeune peintre de 25 printemps apparaît, à travers sa participation à L’Exposition de Turin, comme un interprète sensible et poétique de la Nature. Son tableau évoque, en effet, avec beaucoup de couleur, beaucoup de lumière et des transparences subtiles d’atmosphère, un modeste coin de village enfoui dans la verdure.

Au surplus, il semble bien que les arbres soient les modèles préférés de Gian Rodolfo d’Accardi. Il les peint avec des soins amoureux, tout en s’attachant à n‘en inscrire que la forme synthétique et expressive. Il termine toujours sa toile en une seule séance, même quand il s’agit de figure. Il lui faut en effet, et je le comprends, l’influence de l’inspiration du moment, l’impression fuyante qui permet de réaliser l’œuvre véritablement spontanée et pour cela plus suggestive. Pour la même raison, sa peinture est large, nerveuse toujours nimbée d’une délicate et subtile poésie.

Il est même à remarquer que ce sens poétique manifeste chez Gian Rodolfo d’Accardi ne s’extériorise pas seulement par les tableaux. Il s’exprime aussi littérairement, et le peintre aime accompagner ses toiles de courts poèmes qui en disent l’harmonie et le sens profond avec délicatesse.

Gian Rodolfo d’Accardi est originaire de Palerme. Mais il s’est fixé en 1924 à Milan et a adopté la belle capitale lombarde.” 

Gian Rodolfo d’Accardi (1931). In Revue moderne illustrée des arts et de la vie.