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Not many of us would argue with the statement that during the last few decades our society has been going through radical changes and profound doubts about its future. Artists have been perhaps among the first to ring the alarm bell, beginning in the early part of this century with the movements Expressionism, Dadaism, Surrealism, etc., all directed at pointing out the various signs of disintegration threatening the very foundations of our western culture.
For many years the art of Imero Gobbato had paralleled some of these aesthetic schemes with a series of highly original paintings which came to be known as Transfigurations. These canvasses represented inner landscapes surfacing from the artist's subconscious and, like the work of many of Gobbato's contemporaries could have been classified under the general heading of what the poet Ezra Pound has called "diagnostic art" or an art dedicated to analyzing states of cultural disquietude. This of course is only one of the functions of art, for again, quoting Pound, a culture survives only when besides a diagnostic art it also produces a "healing art" capable of asserting hope, of capturing beauty, of reflecting what in more innocent days, we called, "joy of living".
It seems that in art, as in life, there are seasons. A season to question, to protest, perhaps even to be indignant. And then, a season to pause and take stock of what is left of the goodness and beauty of the world and make the best of it.
In recent years, Gobbato has more and more felt the need, almost the urgency to divert his artistic activity from the introspective qualities of his Transfigurations and turn it toward the depiction of the coastscapes of Maine and of his native Italy before the inexorable advance of the developers has caused their irreversible extinction. The technique used in these paintings is that of Neoimpressionism, which although a direct descendant of Impressionism, differs from it by demanding a greater accent in the formalization of the picture. Whereas the Impressionistic painter subordinates his artistic impulses entirely to the poetry and mood of the scene in front of him, the Neoimpressionist first absorbs this mood, possibly relates it to previous and equivalent poetic experiences and finally externalizes it on the canvas by means of more conceptualized composition and a more symbolic choice of colors. In both schools there is a great emphasis on luminosity and vibrancy of color achieved mainly by depositing the pigments on the canvas in thousands of separate brushstrokes. From this separation or "division" of colors came the term "Divisionism", another definition of Neoimpressionism and, incidentally, the one favored by Seurat and Signac and by Segantini, Pellizza and Morbelli who very brilliantly represented the movement in Italy.
For Imero Gobbato it is of great symbolic importance to have received his artistic education at the Academy of Fine Art of Brera, in Milan, Italy, where most of the Italian Divisionists also received their training. Thus, his present work shows a never forgotten tie with the tradition which, beginning in France in the days of Pisarro and Monet, and from there spreading to Europe and America under the somewhat generic name of Impressionism, prided itself on producing an art healthily concerned with the harmonious relationship between Man and Nature, or to put it even more simply, an art totally unashamed of celebrating happiness and beauty.
Imero Gobbato was born in Northern Italy. He studied art in Milan and Venice and graduated as Master of Art at the Art Institute of Venice. Post-graduate studies in mural painting and oil followed at the Academies of Fine Art of Milan and Venice. His work has been shown in collective and one-man shows in New York, North Carolina, Florida and California. Since 1966, Imero Gobbato has been a resident of Maine. His art is in the permanent collection of the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, Maine.
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