L’Arena Daily Incontro
virtuale tra musica e pittura
Roberto Ceruti composes for an American artist
June 7, 2001
Virtual meeting of music and painting
Tomorrow morning at 11 a.m., at the Galleria
Scala Arte, in front of Castelvecchio, the exhibition of an important
union of music and painting will take place. Audio-visual shows do
not represent an absolute novelty, but the unpublished event is the
singular inspiration of two people across a great distance: the American
painter Pat Boyer and the Veronese composer Roby Ceruti, and at the
center of their respective attention is the Arena.
Pat was born in Michigan, and she moved later to Haverford, where she
currently resides, while working in Norristown in Pennsylvania. Recently,
she exhibited her work at the Rockefeller Arts Center Gallery, the State
University of New York and Fredonia College, and she has won some prestigious
awards, such as the Woodmere Art Museum Award.
Ceruti is Veronese, and was an active promoter of musical initiatives
such as “Verona Beat,” “Toprock Verona,” “Blues
Night,” “Rock Blues" and "Things Close By” and
is the protagonist of many evenings of music with Renato and the Kings,
the Caterpillars, Shel Shapiro and many others. As a composer, member
of SIAE and the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors,
he was already receiving honors in the seventies such as the Bauer Prize
for Sport Cinematography (in the soundtrack category) and is the author
of music for comedies performed by the Puka group, such as “Il
Malessere” and also of various other music. As an artist, he is
present in almost 50 discographies as a musician, composer, or art executive.
What was able to artistically join two people that don’t even know
each other, who live in two different and distant places, both geographically
and culturally? “Having frequented the Arena and its damp arcovoli
(arch sections) for many years first as an passionate appreciator, then
inspector of the stage orchestra, I was able to perceive these presences,
like fluctuating energies, that were trying to make themselves clear
using various forms. It’s something that stays with you”,
says the Veronese composer, “and that leaves you with the desire
to make known to others that which has filled your soul”. Then
he recounts having begun to compose music without logical connections.
One day, surfing the Internet, he casually encountered the works of Pat
Boyer inspired by the Roman amphitheater, and he realized that the same
sentiments were common to both artists. He decided therefore to dedicate
the work he was composing - six pieces constructed instinctively in the
space of a year - to Pat’s paintings and to unite them in a CD,
together with a cultured polyphonic composition by Maestro Roberto Muttoni,
which moves into the realm of the imagined surreal, under the title “Voice
of Verona”, also the title of the show.
The surrealist painting, stretching toward the infinite and toward the
annulment of space/time, combines perfectly with the “sonoric spheroids” made
up of fugues, continual changes of tonality, and absence of prefabricated
structures that erupted out of the Veronese musician’s mind. It
is homage to an ambassador of Verona to the world, who will also be recognized
by Giulio Tarmassia of the Giulietta Club.
|
|
Quotidiano L’Arena “Ispirati
all’Arena i quadri dell’Americana Pat Boyer”
June 11, 2001
American Pat Boyer’s paintings
inspired by the Arena
“Pat Boyer: Voice of Verona” is
the title of the exhibition that the American painter is ordaining
After having studied art at University and at the Center for Creative
Studies in Detroit, Michigan, Pat Boyer, inspired by the expressionism
of Emil Nolde and the realism of Chaim Soutine, began to exhibit her
works, participating in numerous collaborative shows and preparing several
of her own in America and Europe.
For years, she has spent several weeks at a time in Italy and she stayed
in Verona a few years ago, attending the Opera at the Arena, a place
that fascinated her to the point of conceiving a series of paintings,
all inspired by the Roman monument. With acrylics, pastels, and graphite,
the painter interpreted this fantastic stone amphitheater, giving it
organic forms and colors, sometimes dramatic, sometimes meditative.
Colorful resonances, figural deformations, and suspensions in space reach
a level of painting that doesn't limit itself to recording what is seen,
but interprets the image, transforming it with the act of painting. It
almost seems that Pat Boyer, with her paintings, intends to lead the
spectator “along an interior course using a sequence of lines evoking
elliptical, airy and fluctuating shapes, as though floating in space,
apparently weightless”. In this way, amid the varying repetition
of the shape of the Arena, the American artist creates images that seem
to be suggested more by a free, fascinating interior force than by the
rationality of the composing gesture.
|
