Pio Vintera
1940-2020
People who pass in front of the paintings by Pio Vintera have the feeling their being stimulated to recall different moments of the choral history of Savona, or to re-live private emotions.
Observing them means being guided by the suggestions and sensations that Vintera paints and then letting oneself go with one's memory to relive the atmosphere that was lived in the alleys and squares of some time ago; to make comparisons with the Savona of now, with its monuments so equal to 15 years ago; but at the same time so different.
In Vintera's paintings there is nobody. There is no nature. At most, at the bottom of the alley, you'll see an elusive "presence". The streets and corners of Savona are monumental and deserted. Its austere arcades. The imposing colonnades. Silence seems to be the master if it were not for here and there, is broken up by a "mural" postsessantottino or a "graffiti" laid, on a door or on a wall, by someone whose cry would be lost if it hadn't been captured by Vintera. Those disturbing years! Savona has suffered the agony of the last one hundred years of his life. The industrial city - defeated and disappointed. It is up to the medieval and nineteenth-century city to once more take up, without delay, the threads of its history and to re-establish a new identity for the homo faber savonese. The man who, through the monumentality of his constructions, in the paintings of Pio, dominates in an exasperated and overbearing way; even if absent. You cannot see him, but he is the one who made history.
Elio Ferraris
Starting in the 1970s, with continuity and fidelity, Pio Vintera devoted himself to the theme of architecture and the urban landscape. His architecture and streets, devoid of human figures, occupy the entire field of the painting, with exaggerated perspectives that extend beyond the ordinary vanishing points.
The terminal stretch of Via Paleocapa with its arcades, built at the turn of the century, and still a favourite place for strolling and shopping in the Savona area, the most significant buildings in the city centre, are the only presence of a Savona revived in an unreal and geometric dimension.
Of the man appear only some signs: written and graffiti punctually recorded together with the architectural details and the decorations of the individual buildings.
Eliana Mattiauda
The large canvases, arranged in such a way as to create the effect of a three-dimensional screen, welcome those who contemplate them in a poetic world, where at the expressive intensity that makes one think of certain works by Maurice Utrillo, there are atmospheres of dechirichian breath.
Here, however, the "oneiric detachment" that is captured through the plasticity of the geometric structures pervaded by a loneliness at first sight devoid of human handholds, is often contrasted by a call that the author addresses to reality, with the transcription of some messages that re-proposed on the walls enter our sensitive universe as intellectual stimuli, as significant moments of our daily experience. From the stillness of the walls we recover a reality that is life, thought, denunciation of the evils from which society suffers, transposition of values, will to communicate, to transmit signs that remain as historical memory.
An instrument of great communication, Vintera's art takes into account all the categories that have a relational relationship.
I realise now that in order to "discuss'' Pio Vintera's painting, it became natural for me to use some terms that I want to summarise and repeat here, because the most appropriate references to me sealed the meaning of his art: love, poetry and infinity. Here his universe is concentrated and unfolds, making us part of a human project, projected in the space and time of his remarkable artistic temper, he leads us along the ineffable paths of love and poetry in a constant search for the infinite.
Franca Maria Ferraris
