Piero Guccione

Master Piero Guccione was born in Scicli on May 5, 1934, and passed away on October 6, 2018, in Modica. “My thoughts on the idea of painting the sea stem from my childhood memories. I would arrive from Scicli with a cart, and suddenly, after a short climb, as I descended, I could see the sea. It was a wonderful apparition. The sense of depth, the distance, and the light gave the sea a sweet movement. That vision represented, for me as a child, a paradise. When, in the late 1960s, I began to paint that sea, it felt as though no one had ever painted it before. Our tradition led us to create gestural painting, and thus I believe that the first Sicilian paintings are more ideas than landscapes. It is not a descent into things, but painted dreams, as Merleau-Ponty says. I would have liked those small paintings to convey more of a confrontation with things.”

The Master’s paintings are beautiful, possessing a contemplative strength that rivals few other works made of that unparalleled blue that Giuseppe Iannaccone has come to know through works such as After Sunset or Landscape. Guccione makes an extreme act of Sicilian identity by placing his easel not in front of what Sicily might provide him with in diverse, picturesque, and painterly images, but rather in front of what is most flat and still: the surface of the sea and the expanses of scorched earth. “Guccione does not paint the sea; he paints feelings through the sea, which is why he is grand. He seeks the best values of the human soul,” the collector further remarks. His works are Mediterranean, needing few words to be understood; one only needs to observe those lines cutting through the sky and consider that this is the color that love, anticipation, or silence might possess.