Siniscalchi’s world: Messages and contents of an artistic lawyer
It is a rare event to meet a lawyer that has a gift for painting. It seems so unusual to see a picture painted on its two sides, front and back, as most of the art works are painted only on their front side. All these unusual elements are kept together by an amazing artist called Giuseppe Siniscalchi that joined the Western mentality and the Japanese and Eastern features creating an intense mixture of elements and suggestions. As a journalist, a writer and a big fan of Giuseppe, as well as painting and art in general, from literature, to music or films, in this little essay I try to summarize some peculiar messages of his art entering in his inner universe. Born on 20th october as the great French poet Jean Arthur Rimbaud, Siniscalchi makes a complicated experiment made of symbols, colors, lonely characters in contemplation of the Infinite as the Romantic poets as Wordsworth, Shelley , Novalis or Giacomo Leopardi. He creates in his pictures a dialogue between nature and human being, contemplating the sky, the moon and the night or the daily sunlight in a completely new way. He paints for peace and harmony using strong colors and creating meaningful atmospheres, he is not a simple painter but he has invented an artistic movement, “Il Fronteversismo” (in english Frontbackism”) an original term entailing the concept of going beyond the appearances and looking for the depth and spiritual dimension of people and of landscapes around us. So the world and the nature have a spiritual, deep, unknown message that this painter wants to explore showing it to our eyes. This is not an easy task in this society of fashion, beauty and success where we pay too much attention to dresses and physical perfection, neglecting the soul that many times is reduced to a little detail. This is a very rebellious message. Which are the arguments of his art works? Which are the themes and the untold meanings of his pictures? Here I try to give an answer to these questions by writing in few lines some of the main features of this artist.
Back to Front: Not only a technique but a concept of Fronteversismo (Frontbackism)
It is so original to paint on the two sides of every object, illuminating with color the “dark side of the Moon”, as Pink Floyd would say. No painter has done it before, in the expositions we see only the front of every art work but Siniscalchi wants to tell us more than a simple technique. “Frontbackism” (Fronteversismo) is a concept, an artistic movement, a philosophy of life. Reality is more complicated than an amount of days and time. Many people are full of mysteries and dark sides. There is always something that we don’t know and that we can’t imagine. The great American band The Doors and their charismatic singer and poet Jim Morrison told that their name took inspiration from the division between the “known” and the “unknown”. The appearance and the reality and their mutual contradictions stimulated lots of artists, singers, and filmmakers as Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni or Bernardo Bertolucci but nobody invented a movement dedicated to this argument. Siniscalchi did it several years after their movies and not with existential intellectualism but in a simple way with drawings and colors.
A new conteplation of nature
The sun, the moon, the dawn, in contemporary art many times are underrated. Many painters concentrate themselves on human beings, portraits, faces, houses and cities. Here nature, cosmos, space and primordial elements are the real protagonists of his paintings that seem so similar to Monet but with the strength of Van Gogh, so close to the English naturalists such as Constable and Turner as well as to poets such as Wordsworth, Shelley and John Keats. Nature is meaningful to this painter, the sky and the boats in the sea mean something more than a simple description. Using many times red, blue and strong yellow and color games, Siniscalchi redraws all the world that he sees around him. Fantastic are the moon, the sun, the nights on the fields, on the spring grass, and the sunsets with the red, the blue or the yellow that wildly shine as we would see them in front of us. This artist is intense, open, energetic also when you know him personally and he reproduces his positive existentialism in his art. He expresses himself through the nature, looking to the landscapes in a personal way and giving personality and vitality to introspection and mystery.
Oriental and Western artist: Two worlds in the same person
Siniscalchi joins two mentalities, the western world with his italian culture and the Oriental spirituality, constantly present in many of his paintings but in a delicate way. With some Japanese words as “Wa” or some man in Kimonon suites, or some portraits of his son Leonardo with some exotic suites, we can see this influence very clearly.
Married with a Japanese woman, Mutsue, this artist has been so much influenced by extreme oriental spirituality and this interest for the interior dimension of life and art comes from this background. The message of harmony, quietness, the use of some forms and languages come from Extreme Orient with a sober spirituality, The italian elegance and the Japanese sobriety make a great mixture so innovative and expressive that really captures the attention of every spectator.