Adolfo Penocchio’s Art Journey: From Blindness Recovery to Divine Comedy
“I was blind. Blind from an illness. The passion for painting gnawed at me more than the blindness itself. So I took the brush and started to draw lines, trying out circles. Then the light returned. The operation cured the blindness. This is the result.” Adolfo Penocchio, a native of Ghedi like Arturo Marpicati, from a now distant Ghedi—visible from his villa in Polpenazze—shows sketches of blindness, mysterious folders, upright figures, precise, ambulatory. Only the face is obscured, seeming like an emptiness that will be filled by the painter’s technique once he has applied the stain.
The news about Adolfo Penocchio, therefore, is his recovery; it’s the forty years of painting completed recently, celebrated by a unique dedication. Penocchio opens his house-museum to friends and passersby from 3 PM to 6 PM every day. On the gate, handcrafted, is written: “Arte 2000, Permanente di Adolfo Penocchio.”
Such courage and unbeatable medicine as that of meeting, for the praise that will surely come from many familiar with the master’s work and the few who see it for the first time. Another surprise is the hundred fifty watercolor paintings depicting the Divine Comedy, a work by the Brescia artist dedicated to Fellini, full of relevance—where political scheming is condemned to hell, and pink and blue sabers belong to the heaven of Paradise.
The work was laborious, awaiting critical attention capable of presenting the artist’s work to the entire Brescia cultural scene. Penocchio’s paintings are housed in his home as the air the artist breathes—accompanying the seasons of his life, from early 19th-century realism, to encounters with sociality and metaphysics, with symbols and surrealism, interpreted through a spiritualistic perspective. The inspiration of the plains painter, retreating within the Benaco olive grove, is founded on declared faith.
Artistic Interpretations and Visions
Metaphysics, the formal and symbolic line of the artist, is grounded in a predominantly fideistic enlightenment. There are visions in the yellow-orange hues of Penocchio’s environment and celestial directions in the chessboard of his post-dechirichian squares. The reinterpretation of Giotto and Chagall is in the glow of biblical severity. Strict Penocchio, first with himself.
“Energy,” he says, “both pictorial and human, is ours, according to the law of free will. We choose, and the hand moves according to that choice. But the choice already has its purpose. I paint and guide my respect towards creation and its Creator.”