From his eclectic professional background in advertising, graphics and scenography design, Gian Piero Gasparini moved in the late 1990s primarily to portrait painting and mural arts, applying his unique airbrush technique to the creation of gigantic hyperrealist wall paintings. Gasparini emerged as an artist at an art exhibition of young talents in December 2005, and to date he has held numerous one-man shows and group exhibitions, both in Italy and internationally.
In Old Masters Reloaded at Christie's London the artist showcases an exquisite selection of paintings made with interlaced fabric which creates texture while generating depth to classic inspired images.
The term Old Masters refers to the most recognised European artists, predominantly painters, working between the Renaissance and 1800. Gian Piero Gasparini pays homage to the Old Masters, bringing to life with a formidable twist of talent and creativity outstanding revisited images. Hands, feet, torsos, and facial features together form part of his vocabulary of expression, which he uses to symbolize the metaphorical language of the vicissitudes of daily life.
For Gasparini the past is a fundamental component of the survival and regeneration of the future, based as it is upon knowledge, an essential element to guard and to protect, so as not to lose sight of it in the darkness which separates reality and the virtual world of the digital age.
The artist reconnects the divergent strains of a system which simultaneously links and creates networks that form an individuality both reflecting the needs of digital innovation, but also meticulously revels in the historical texture of millennia of human evolution. Gian Piero’s paintings are reinterpretations with a contemporary twist, keeping an eye on scientific, mathematic, and geometric aspects that his visual arts embrace. Gasparini adopts elements from the history of art, allusions and reflections of the past masters, in order to give a direction and purpose to his world of contemporary reality.
The body of work entitled LDV is an expressly created homage to Leonardo da Vinci, and consists of a series of paintings exploring the links between art and mathematics, space and harmony, proportion and beauty.
In the group of paintings Profundum Nigrum, Gasparini explores the basis of humankind’s location at the centre of the universe, a late Renaissance anthropocentric vision, furthermore redolent of Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro style.
Through Gasparini art is revisited not only as an aesthetic expression, but also as an element linked to contemporary life, a vehicle of communication and of new ideas, offering the observer a new spiritual and cultural vision, facilitating the creation of a better world through art and artifice more in harmony with what surrounds us.