art critic – art historian – curator
From color reborn in spirit
To be reborn through colour—plunging into its densities, its weaves of light.
It means returning to primeval matter, to the maternal womb, to life’s very origin. For someone like Renato Li Vigni, who has always made colour the vehicle of an experience that is not only artistic but also spiritual, rebirth can happen only through full immersion in colour. And not just any colour, but the azure of sky and sea in his native land, Venezuela: intense, radiant, brilliant—an azure from which to set out again in the new cycle Renacimiento Azul.
The choice of Spanish marks a homecoming, a restart from the country whose light, wide waters and luxuriant landscapes first forged Li Vigni’s innate sense of colour. Those images together form a “palette” he has always drawn on—now tapped afresh and with renewed vigour in these works that speak of a “rebirth” both spiritual and stylistic. Chromatically this rebirth is expressed by a dominant azure symbolising a luminous depth that holds within itself the divine, creation, the genesis of the world.
Beginning again from azure is like returning to the source of everything—of light, of water, of life itself; it is swimming upstream through time to the dawn of the world, to a brightness still charged with hope, promise and love. The gaze turns to the absolute, immaterial expanses of transcendence, and from there the artist recommences with a painting that is even more meditative, reflective, interior—using colour as an ever-clearer conduit for translating an intimate “refinement” of the spirit into the visual plane.
Painting thus bears witness to a spiritual journey that links humankind’s inner needs with the artist’s expressive urgencies, passing through various states and dimensions of the soul—signified by alternating material densities and chromatic dissolves, zones of shadow and “eruptions” of light.
Alongside azure, in tonal gradations up to deep blue, reappear the primary red and yellow which, together with gold, make the paint gleam and shimmer—signals of a radiant epiphany through which the sacred inscribes itself within the image. For the first time, dark hues—black to brown—also appear; set against the gold they evoke the luminous path of the spirit rising from darkness. Emerging from the gloom, the work is suffused with hope, bringing the act of painting close to a mystical experience—an idea that has long animated Li Vigni’s art in his conviction that art, like beauty itself, can draw humanity nearer to the mystery of God.
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