Critical introduction by Giuliana Matthieu Editor of the "La Ballata" - Magazine of Art and Culture - Livorno - Italy

There are diverse and numerous main points in the art of Anchise Picchi. Because his many years of experience and of work he succeed in reaching a formally perfect technique that joins ability of manipulation of all expressive medium (charcoal, oil, pencil, sanguine, and at last the computer) to the problems of our age. The artist faces the central idea. We live in a world of communication and the image has become by now the basic tool of such communication, with most varied means: photographic film, wood, clay, sketch paper, photocopier, but always and better with the magic of the colors that wrap and overwhelm with the emotions that the color itself arouses.

In his long artistic run, beginning at the end of the forties with a sculptural start, the artist proceeded with oil painting (not neglecting indeed water-color, tempera, fresco, crayon), which he used in facing the main, unchangeable themes of the humanity: the work, the family, the love, with the refined perception of his internal world that always he read through the filter of an archaic wisdom.

Searching new manners and passed a first period of "macchiaiolo" traditionalism, the artist, with the restlessness of his bitter-sweet youth, he changes from a forced run and he presents himself in a completely different manner, in a new symbolic-surrealist vision , applying a stronger light and shadow tonality to the simple visual showing. The artist after this experience, continue yet to spy the surrounding world, he tries to fill the void of the daily life in observing the perfection of the human figure and the landscape, in the reading of their expressive and aesthetical codes. It is so born the third period that reflects in toto the anima mundi, in the vision of farmers at work, of countries shaken by the scythe in the belief that a present age without a past can't exist. Neo or post-pointillist, for that lumpy consistence, in the flaking of objects, the artist is certainly faithful to his code of reading, and he is feeling with the problems of his age, in the interpretation of the roles and meanings of the life. Anchise Picchi refuses the academic homologation, so taking profusely inspiration from the themes and values of our age, experimenting new techniques, with immediate naturalness and so breaking the traditional schemes.

The dominant theme of his work is always the man with all his problems, the urgencies of the daily life, with the allusions to its numerous situations, expressed in the endlessness of differences of our common unconscious and however of our life.

He owns a multiform personality as his painting has, nonconformist and independent, attracted by all everything that is new and desirous in getting by art the reality, always in constant fusion with his mind. The numerous sketches of the anthological presented in the CD-ROM (about 600 in number) volunteer to the eye as inciting facts of an ending world, by a black marked contour drawings that underline its dramatic urgency and overflowing vitality. To invade the pictorial space are instead the segments, the silent description of running figures, almost poetic exemplification of the human offices, of virginal looks of girls in the magic observation of the reality. His alive and harmonious painting (Nocturne, The Woodman, Reeds in the wind, The nanny, Sandro on the big vase, The vintage, Woman at well ) pursues the aesthetical perfection, going out yet from the traditional way of a pure description, because it always comments with the truth of a genuine feeling, the human path. Portraits, landscapes, and still life: they all are pleasant analysis of a moving world that is able to withstand the wear of the flowing time with the simplicity in grasping its multiform expressiveness.

Numerous are the themes the artist deals with and they concern urbanistic, anthropological, landscape and naturalistic subjects; in his vast production it's possible to recognize the sense of a melancholically emerging past, on wounded faces by the flowing time. Plastic lyricism, rush and description in an almost epigraphic form, so offering to the observer a large panorama of composition in a frame of faces, figures, landscapes. Never painting of tendency or of occasion but rigorous layout of a work that reflects an historical moment.

People say the old age is the time of wisdom, but it is also that of the reflection and of tiredness, because the old man, and Anchise Picchi so really is, doesn't succeed to move with the times. But a long life spent in working is a fortune, a pure fact that acquires value entirely by a longi temporis prescriptio, in the usual attempt to raise the reality to the ideal. Here is the main desire of the artist in embodying his internal project accompanying him up to a satisfying conclusion that Anchise Picchi never failed.

Giuliana Matthieu. Livorno January, 3, 2000.

Special thanks to Melinda Ossola and Rita Di Pietro for the help in the English translation.