Press & Reviews

Animals are a widely used subject by artists: the symbolic values ​​attributed to animals are marked by a fixity that makes them stable within

the narrative dialectic activated by painters. Valentino Camiletti stands with poise and grace among the artists who have chosen the wild as the primary exponent of their creative work.

Each of his works is, in effect, a small story: a fragment where reality and fantasy are wedged into a parallel space, in which nature is allegorized and has the role of evoking ancestral figures. Animals captured in "normal" poses, in fact, offer themselves to the observer with their burden of meaning, which, however, can be discerned behind the apparent pictorial imprint on the surface.

From time to time, the owl makes an appearance, with its evocative power that evokes night and darkness, but also the sacred dimension that envelops the figure of Athena like a metaphysical aura.

And then wolves, cheetahs, tigers, mountain lions: animals that better than others embody the symbolism of the wild world, with its often violent and cruel rules when viewed from a homocentric perspective, notoriously poorly objective when compared to living beings deemed "inferior".

Valentino Camiletti is at ease in large spaces: places unmarked by human traces, where nature has absolute dominion and its forces hurl themselves with irrepressible power on living creatures and things.

Using a vibrant palette, the painter creates consistently evocative figures, allowing color to dominate the drawing, thus breaking free from rigidity and clichés. The result is always captivating, because, undeniably, Camiletti's animals are clear, authentic, and evocative.

The painter doesn't seek to astonish, but simply leaves nature to astonish us, for it is the true protagonist of his research: a nature that is light years away from our metropolitan reality, where often the only wild world we know about is that of National Geographic.

The wilderness we can immerse ourselves in by observing the works on display in the gallery is freed from literary conventions and ecological rhetoric: there is no room for philosophy, only for life.

That wildness, in fact, which reverberates continuously in the depths of our ancestral memories and settles in the unconscious, where it transforms into a symbol.

I believe it's a privilege for few to witness glimpses of animal life that unfold daily in the mountains or in the most secluded corners of a forest or a marsh.

Valentino Camiletti, with his drawings, offers us all moments of intense naturalistic interest, enriched by situations, plays of light and shadow, minute details, and fairytale landscapes that only a hand guided by an innate artistic talent, but even more so by a profound interest in animals, can faithfully capture.

Long waits spent together, waiting for dawn, hidden in cramped huts.

The last sounds of nocturnal animals hurrying to their dens. Then, before the sun's rays pierce the foliage and the night mist, the suspicious arrival of wild animals. Images that fill the eyes and imprint indelible memories in the mind. Visions in fairytale atmospheres that I have experienced countless times with my friend Valentino, but that only he, with his artistic and naturalistic sensitivity, could transfer to paper. It is his precise and orderly hand that manages to bring out even the smallest details of the scenes captured by his eyes in those unforgettable moments. A painting course is certainly not enough to train an artist like Valentino Camiletti: his love for nature and his meticulous observation emerges from his paintings like a delicate and exuberant spiritual blossoming. I am certain that Valentino will continue to paint many moments stolen from nature, but for this to happen, a protected natural environment is the only guarantee that the secret and mysterious unfolding of animal life will continue over time.

Nature can become a central component of a poetic complicity created with an artist's vision, offering and opening up evolutionary compositional scenarios that demonstrate an eclectic conception of art. Valentino Camiletti loves to pervade and imbue his canvases with universal and comprehensive pictorial visions, almost as if they were physical and imaginative openings onto real, natural, living landscapes, imbued with a clarity that only the artist's skillful use of color and hues can offer and bestow upon us.

Camiletti loves to play consciously with technique which, as in every quality artist with his own aesthetic and lyrical path, becomes a fundamental and founding part of an ongoing search for descriptive and pictorial alphabets, functional to guaranteeing us sensations as incisive as they are penetrating and intense.

The author loves to study the best technique by ranging across different tools and materials, used in subordination to the idea that the artist himself has in the act preceding the composition: the attention to detail, the appreciation for the particular, the meticulousness invested in defining the completeness of the almost fantastic landscape that he is going to define, even starting from truly conceivable elements, give us further evidence of the careful study that the author puts into applying the paint to the canvas. The technical passages offer us a complex spectrum of Camiletti's compositional ability, which does not shy away from the use of remote techniques, the return in many of his works to egg tempera, in addition to the usual watercolor and pastel, sealing a meeting between the pencil line and the dense aesthetic completeness of airbrush painting. In Camiletti's work, we can sense traces of certain Renaissance and Flemish painting, which highlight the artist's training, which grew from reproducing works by the great masters of these cultural movements.

Camiletti has an obsession—one he cannot renounce if he wishes to call himself an artist in his own right—and it consists in depicting subjects from the natural world, fauna celebrated in all its species, from wild animals to regal, elegant ones; from nocturnal birds to more domesticated animals. The artist profoundly and comprehensively depicts lifelike scenarios: they reveal a pictorial quality in which a light can stand out, hinted at simply by the application of brushstrokes. Here, color becomes the sole element upon which to develop the figures, illuminating, with its captivating immensity, the tiger as if under the spotlight of a photographic lens in the darkness of the Savannah night. Realism in this context becomes hyperrealism, a perspective of a set of elements and subjects addressed in their individuality, in the constituent parts of minimal details. Camiletti is not content with simple narratives of reality, but offers visions that become signifiers of almost ancient, ancestral, remote symbols and concepts, hidden in the appearance and significance of the animal portrayed: symbolism combines and intertwines with hyperrealism, opening up unexpected, surprising, and engaging visions. Camiletti's work also delves into the fantastical and almost imaginative narrative of landscapes with a mythological and neoclassical flavor, improbable situations in which a human subject finds himself portrayed with a feline in a surreal, evocative setting.

The ironic references and clever allusions to Renaissance works that immortalize the actions of animals in familiar contexts from the history of artistic literature are striking: we see birds stealing from the basket of Michelangelo's Still Life in the astonishing and fascinating work ironically titled Theft in the House of Merisi. In this context, we can appreciate Camiletti's full Symbolist expressive range, a triumph of color and skill in redefining, not simply reproducing, but playfully reinterpreting, landscapes by great Renaissance masters: no didactic academic recollection, but a work of a production that becomes full of meanings and symbols, imaginations and possibilities of escapes that lead the spectator to stop and become an accomplice with the artist in a journey that is fun but, at the same time, light and pleasant, aesthetically and poetically speaking.