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BelluttiGiulio Bellutti was born in Bonizzo, in the province of Mantova, Italy. He attended the Art Institute of Mantova where he earned a high school diploma in the arts. After high school, he transferred to Genoa and enrolled in the University of Architecture. His first exhibits were in 1968 at Mantova, Ferrara and Rovigo. From 1976 to 1982 he was present with personal exhibits at the events of the Festival dei Due Mondi at Spoleto. In addition, he was present in 1977 in Rome at Studio Due and in Bologna at Galleria dei Tribunali. The following year found him in Macerata at l’Assessorato alla Cultura.
Afterwards, while not forgetting his painting, he dedicated his energies to the theatre, working in the fields of scenography and direction for, among others, Alessandro Bussotti at Teatro alla Scala (Trittico di Puccini), Giancarlo Nanni at the Opera Theatre of Genoa, and for Mauro Bolognini at the San Carlo Theatre in Naples. From 1977 to 1990 he also followed closely the artistic career of the American soprano Olivia Stapp.
Returning to his native Mantova for a few years, he specialized in portraits in oil producing many commissioned works.  In 2002 he was invited by the President of  “Dante Alighieri” in Montecarlo, Monaco to exhibit his work at the Salle des Variété. In 2004, together with Aurelio Caminati and Raimondo Sirotti, he participated in “Canzoniere: Poets, Musicians and Painters Sing of Love” by Thea De Benedetti at the Carlo Felice Theatre Auditorium in Genoa, and the publication of the related catalog and CD.


belluttiIn the same year he was invited to participate in the exhibition  Medesign: Forms of the Mediterranean  hosted by Galleria Arte Studio of  Genoa,  which included works by Lucio Fontana, Mimmo Rotella, Emilio Scanavino and was organized by the Faculty of Architecture. This event was a significant part of the celebration of Genoa: European Capital of Culture.
In 2005 he had another personal exhibition at the Gallery of Contemporary Art at Agheiro in Lavagna-Genoa, Italy.

In 2007: "Pucciniana, Half Serious Ecstasy And Transfigurations" at THE CASA ITALIANA ZERILLI-MARIMO' of N.Y. University March, 21st / April, 20th.


His works are present in numerous private collections, amongst which that of  the soprano Katia Ricciarelli and at the Museum of La Scala Theatre with the portrait of Iris Adami Corradetti.

 

When painting takes the stage

The seductions of the stage, the lure of the spotlight, the cry of Action! Camera!, not to mention the solemn raising of the inevitably red velvet curtain, but also the glitter of gilded theatre friezes - these are the scenes and unrepeatable moments that mark the threshold beyond which Giulio Bellutti’s imagination puts life into a world that is hyperreal because it reflects the most visionary aspect of reality. If you don’t enter the magic circle where the ritualistic formula triggers a sense of wonder, you are automatically excluded from access to his work, which has its manifest origin in this formula. However, if you want to enter and leave the magic of the set you need to be part actor and part magician; to be transformed into a seducer you need to have been an object of seduction, and there is no doubt that he is the first to have fallen under the magnetic fascination of the gaze, of the symbolic sacrality of red, of the profundity of a black that is opulent and not mournful, the impenetrable mystery of the subject, the movements of the body, the spiral windings of the fold, the fluid lines of the garment. His dedication to the portrait is by no means casual. Both his house (with its late baroque furnishings) and his work resemble his passion because they respect his style of life. Depth and surface both seduce him, as night after night, year in year out, they put on the same performance at the same pre-arranged time in opera house stalls. In Genoa it is the Carlo Felice opera house that awaits him, but straight theatre too puts him under the spell of the stage world that has so fatally taken over his imagination.

À rebours

If we then go back to the years of his artistic training in the sculpture class at the State Art Institute in Mantua, which were to leave their mark in the sharp profile of his outlines, to his falling in love with Nietzsche, with the frozen time of De Chirico’s squares of Italy and mannequins, D’Annunzio’s literary aestheticism and Giulio Carlo Argan’s conceptual seminars, we find the reasons behind his aesthetic choices. He has learnt the great lesson of the figure in space from a series of ineluctable masters: first from Giotto and Pier della Francesca, and later from Caravaggio’s luminarism and baroque folds, Füssli’s Mitteleuropean visions, David’s neoclassicism and Ingres’ rosy-complexioned portraits.
BelluttiIn 1974 and 1975 he was involved with the undergraduate shows put on by the Baistrocchi Company in Genoa. After his brilliant debut at the Festival dei due Mondi di Spoleto, in 1976, where he was given an award for the stage settings in his painting, and after his involvement (in the 1980s and early 1990s) with post-romantic quotationism, cultured portraiture (at times neo-Baroque, at times crepuscular), studded with metaphors, symbols, decorative friezes, pale flowers, livid marmoreal ruins, clouds ruffled by the wind and trompe-l’oeil, between 1994 and 2000 he left Genoa, where he had moved to start his studies at the Faculty of Architecture in the distant 1972, to go back to his native Mantua, to be near his elderly parents, returning again to the thematic sacrality of portraits in oil. Reading L’odore dell’India, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1962 travel notes (about a journey Pasolini made with Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia), inspired him to embark on a great journey to the Far East (in 1998). On his return, Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha introduced him to a new vision of the world, absorbed into nature and silence, free of the disquiet and the ghosts of western culture, open to an aesthetics of contemplation and the void. Luce, Eleonora, Corallo and Turbante Arancione are the results of this ecstatic image. These works, among others, were on display in the one-man show Teatralità e tentazione (2002), in Monte Carlo, curated by Alain Moureau, Ministères des Affaires Etrangères, Paris, organised by Fabrizio Di Giura, President of Dante Alighieri, under the patronage of the  Italian Consul General, Minister Plenipotentiary Mario Piersigilli - an exhibition which came immediately before the present exhibition at the Galleria Agheiro in Lavagna, containing works that all belong to his recent output. The thirteen large and medium-sized canvases mark an evolution in Giulio Bellutti’s discourse towards an awareness of his work on the figure as a portrait of an absent subject, on the quality of a gaze that seeks the complicity of the spectator, the artifice of a scene that constantly repeats the irresistible seduction of the theatre.

*Photos by Maria Bertini