Mario Giacomelli

Mario Giacomelli (August 1, 1925, Senigallia, Italy - November 25, 2000, same location) is an Italian painter, poet and photographer. In 1934, her father died and her mother became a laundress in an old people's home. He worked in 1938 in a printing house and took a strong interest in typographical characters. During the war, the printing press was destroyed, but he rebuilt it, worked there, and during his free time, painted abstract compositions (from which emerges a certain materiality). Also, he launches himself with great interest in poetry and in motor racing. In 1952, a serious accident during a race convinced him to give up this passion. He bought his first camera and immediately felt a link between it and his practice as a painter. He tinkers with his camera, sets up his photography lab and chooses to use contrasting paper from the start in his work. He meets Giuseppe Cavalli thanks to which he joins an amateur photography group: MISA where personalities are present: Piergiorgio Branzi (it), Alfredo Camisa (it), Silvio Pellegrini (es). He returned to the hospice where he worked in photography for three years (Vie d'hospice) while also being interested in photographs of landscapes and still lifes as well as the exploitation of chance. In 1955 he won first prize at the national exhibition in Castelfranco Veneto. He says that "the most beautiful pictures are, perhaps, the ones that we don't take, because if we had taken them, we would have ruined something". He (always alone) undertakes short trips to Scanno, Peschici and Lourdes. At the start of the sixties, he met Luigi Crocenzi, in accordance with his desire for narrative photography. In 1963, John Szarkowski, director of the Department of Photography at the New York Museum of Modern Art, purchased his photos from Scanno for the collection of masters of international photography. A year later, he produced a new series of photographs devoted to the seasons and the land. For a year, he follows the rhythm of life of a peasant family (harvests, festivals, harvests, etc.). Then, he makes visits to the hospice and changes the title of his work: Death will come who will have your eyes. He photographs cut tree trunks in a quest for abstraction and produces a series of color photographs: Le Chantier du paysage by linking poetry and abstract painting to photography. From 1969 to 1980, he was particularly interested in lyrical abstraction and carried out various series. He continued his lyric poems and worked on Le Rêve (recit.). In 1997 he decorated the Italian coffee cups of the Illy collection. His sources of inspiration are, among others, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Osvaldo Licini, Giorgio Morandi, Robert Rauschenberg and Barnett Newman.