antique dealer and owner of the Bellini Museum in Florence
Renato Li Vigni a sea of distant colors
And just as the waves of the sea take on colour and change direction according to the wind, the clouds, and the hues of dawn and sunset, so colour becomes visible in Renato Li Vigni’s work.
It is as though, instead of belonging to the sea, the waves belonged to an ocean of thought; these same waves move inside us with evolutions and tones that can emerge only from an imagination beyond reality.
As for colour, every one of his paintings begins with a dazzling, brilliant white—a hue that, for Renato, signifies something intensely real and intimate, as though everything is born there. In conversation with the artist one perceives his deep vision of a world—a world we all hope exists—that lies beyond that white, like a door left ajar for us humans who do not know how to open it, yet wide open for those who firmly believe in something beyond ourselves, something that unites us all, especially when we are afraid of losing earthly life. Each of us knows the afterlife—the “beyond”—exists, but we postpone thinking about it; only when fear or some powerful emotion intervenes do we remember that God exists, and we confide in Him in secret, only to set Him aside again once everything calms down.
Renato sees and describes this light, shading it as it descends from the top of his canvases toward the bottom with waves and abrupt shifts of colour—from bright, strong tones down to blue and then to night. In journeying around himself, Renato discovers and peers beyond the hedge we all carry inside, a hedge we sometimes neither know nor wish to climb.
And what is the darkest zone of colour? The worst stage—what in the vernacular might be called, with a much-used word, the Devil. Yet who is the Devil? He is the greatest believer in God, the only one who knows Him perfectly, the one who once stood beside Him and then became His fiercest enemy. So we cannot say the Devil is not a believer; he knows full well that God exists in His purity—without humanity there would be no Other!
Li Vigni’s paintings display countless variations: he has surely lived profound experiences, moments of ecstasy and mystic states that revealed the white light to him; and, to teach it to us, he has learned to paint it, crafting his own world and measuring colours by his feelings. Renato uses the canvas as an archaic form of expression; down the ages many have tried to “show” the afterlife, or good and evil, or the figure of a God we do not see yet hope exists.
How might one introduce visitors to these images—with that white glare, the purest colour, the hue he has imagined and that so many people who have died and returned say they have seen: the white light surrounded by colours? Li Vigni is courageous; through his works he reveals his own feelings so that others may grasp, interpret and judge them, granting each viewer freedom to dream and, if only for an instant, to relive that light within the heart.
Thus Li Vigni’s sea-waves, the shifting colours that follow the curves of perspective and matter, draw us into a serious dialogue—a dialogue between ourselves, a hidden self, and something far higher. As we look at his canvases, let us try not to see them merely as abstract movements with meanings that seem unreachable; let us see them as a clear invitation to read beyond our own world—a world each of us interprets according to the destiny and the life allotted to us all.
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