With Natura Luce by Attilio Forgioli, the Museo Alta Garda continues a project involving artistic exploration of the landscape of the Alto Garda area through its interpretation by contemporary figures, starting in 2014 with a show by Tullio Pericoli and followed in 2015 by the works of Mario Raciti.
In this, the third chapter in an ongoing project devoted to nature in the Alto Garda area, Attilio Forgioli’s exhibition provides a new insight into the elements that make up the landscape of these places. The works on show are based primarily on an exploration of the artist’s own experience and intimate knowledge of the local area.

During the course of 2015, after some visits to his chosen locations, Attilio Forgioli commenced his work of interpreting a number of aspects of the landscape of Alto Garda, executing a cycle of pastels on paper – of which about 70 in all are on show – quite evidently new in character, but at the same time not too far removed from the images produced during his previous stays in the area, especially in Salò, where his vision of nature was born and developed.

“In Attilio Forgioli’s vision the transformation of the landscape creates a constant tension developing close to other iconographic procedures, still lives, every day objects, architectures, real and imaginary portraits, shapes and places taken from lived experience like moments from a process of becoming that follows the changing balances of colour.
From the early 1960s through to the present, the evocation of nature is an inner impulse felt as a necessary prelude to the painter’s act of painting, to engagement in the aesthetic and moral undertaking of setting up a dialogue with the original roots of the landscape, restoring to its disfigured and contaminated image the enchantment of light and its mild rhythms. […]
In Forgioli’s conception, the landscape is an endless presence that searches for a balance between mental control and pure emotion, in the knowledge that this uncertain path will never be fully measurable and definable, but fixed only in the unsteady fluctuations of the light. […]
Immersed for some months in contemplation of certain locations in Alto Garda, which were observed and interiorised through the slow exercise of pictorial transcription, the artist has managed to transform natural points of reference into images that enjoy enhanced visibility. This process has given birth to a flowing and airy tale, crafted with the quality of pictorial knowledge we have come to associate with Forgioli, the narrative thread of the titles indicating the pleasure of walking between the places that then lead on to other newly discovered thresholds, atmospheres that come to life in the vividness of colour, between the folds and hidden arteries of the landscape. Faced with the visible forms of nature, the artist loves to fantasize, to dress nature with his own colours, to enter and leave using the elements of truth offered by these places, eliciting sensorial moods that surprise the expectations of the reader, ever more attracted by the changes on its face, by the living transformations of light.”
Claudio Cerritelli, 2016