Aldo Gentilini

Aldo Gentilini (7 February 1911 – 10 August 1982) was an Italian painter and sculptor. He was also the founder of the Christian Ranist movement.

Biography

He followed the philosophy courses and for three years he lived in seclusion in a monastery in Pietrasanta under the advice of Don Orione. He was a great admirer of San Francesco D’Assisi and therefore he could not adapt to the conventional commercial system; his innumerable works were thus sold by him for little money. He was an artist practicing asceticism, to imitate the saint to whom he was devoted. The two natures, the human and the aesthetic, perfectly coincide in his tormented figure.

From Genoa to Courmayeur

Gentilini was born in Genoa on 7 February 1911, but Courmayeur, precisely in Portoud in Val Vení, where his family owned a hotel, was his adopted homeland, where he spent his youth. Of the period of Courmayeur are the "Totems", as the artist named his wooden creations, which recall something primitive and raw, rich in images and signs that show an instinctive force, an explosion of sensations still messy and confused.

The retreat in Volpeglino

In the early 1960s, Gentilini retired to Volpeglino, where he remained until his death on August 10, 1982, and, today, following a donation, the house-studio, in which he painted walls, doors, windows and furniture with furniture and objects built by assembling the most varied materials, belongs to the Municipality and could be transformed into a museum center dedicated to the artist's works.

His painting

His painting captures the moments, nuances of the soul, sensations that remain in a sign, in a hatch that vaguely recalls Miró with the decomposition of Picasso, Braque and Léger.