Guido Sgaravatti (Abano Terme, 8 June 1925 – Montegrotto Terme, 25 April 2019)
Painter, sculptor, engraver, profound connoisseur of oriental philosophy, Master of Yoga and deep psychology.
History
The eldest son of Erinus Sgaravatti and Elisa Buratti, Guido was born in 1925 in Abano Terme, in the family home located in the hamlet of Giarre.
His parents directed him to classical studies: after attending the classical high school “Tito Livio” in Padua, and finally he graduated in law.
From a young age, however, he also began to cultivate his artistic vocation, without ever abandoning it despite the study’s commitment.
In those years, in fact, he knows and works withthe mime Jacques Lecoq, while thanks to the activities of the Theater of the University of Padua he becomes a pupil of Amleto Sartori, who brings him closer to the world of drawing and sculpture.
Later, he refined his talent in the studies of the sculptor Luigi Strazzabosco and the painters Antonio Ferro and Dolores Grigolon.
It is precisely here that he meets his future life partner, Raffaella Tognazzo (1928-2017).
He also attended the Academy of Venice, where he studied first with Giuseppe Cesetti, then with the master Venanzo Crocetti.
With Emilio Greco, in Naples, he refined the technique of bronze sculpture, and with Giovanni Ardini he learned the art of marble working.
Driven by the family, up to 40 he also follows the entrepreneurial path, but then completely leaves this road to devote himself to his studies, art and inner research.
manyhis personal and collective exhibitionsin Italy and abroad: he even arrives in Australia, a country he loved for the genuineness of people and the great outdoors, so as to evaluate the possibility of moving there with his family.
In the end, however, he decides to stay in Italy: invited to the Casa degli Artisti in Canale di Tenno, he falls in love with this small center of art and culture, and right here, in this medieval village on the Trentino side of Lake Garda, he buys and restores a home.
The works
Many of his works are kept in numerous public and private collections.
Among the monumental works, we remember the Monument to Sant’Eustochia (1988, Messina), the Door of the Torches (1990, Saponara) and The bow (1991, Giardini Naxos).
Among the most important collections of his works, we remember the Paduan exhibitions “Art and Psychology” at the Civic Gallery (2002) and “From representation to art therapy”, set up at the San Gaetano Cultural Center (2010).
Parallel to his artistic career, he never abandoned his research work on the psychology of the depth and Yoga, studies that led him to publish some books:
- The logic of the irrational (1978)
- See the Mind (2002)
- The myth of Green Tara (2005)
- Planet of the Fools (2007)
- Patanjali. Yoga Sutra (2009, second ed., Translation by G. Sgaravatti)
- The monopoly of the magic (2012)
Among these, the translation, highly appreciated by scholars, of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra stands out, a work that saw him committed to understanding and translating this millennial text from the original written in Sanskrit.
Thanks to his profound knowledge of the human soul, he studies and teaches the technique of return, a non-invasive method to help people disturbed by past traumas.
This technique has around 2000 cases studied and numerous successes, with the elimination of past psychological disorders.
In 2017, together with some friends, Guido Sgaravatti founded the Arte4d association, in order to keep alive the studies and techniques, both artistic and philosophical, of which he was a master.
Even today, some of his students promote and teach a technique he studied to create monotype engravings through printing with the hand press.
The criticism
Below are brief extracts of testimonies from some authors who spoke of his artistic work.
A. Bambara «The spirit that pervades the work"Door of the Torches"connects us to the atmosphere of the arts and crafts typical of Romanesque portals.»
V. Welcome «Experience offers him its own language, which the means of expression rationally engage, according to a sensitivity that frees itself and makes itself more effective and operative, how much better the artist has managed to assimilate his knowledge. In this particular prerogative, S. inserts and moves easily, both when reporting and when transforming it into the concreteness of the image, at the very moment in which it takes place. "
S. Marini «… For him art is a search for inner reality and painting is a support that seeks the deep bond of the spirit with the given object.»
S. Maugeri "... has its own personality and its idea of sculpture, intended as a means of representing, with intelligence and love, man and his events, the investigation of a typology that scans the movements of the psyche and translates them through the the development of plastic structures capable of stopping attitudes, indicating the secret reasons of a personality, his authentic way of being and not of appearing. »
C. Munari "The feature that characterizes the current work consists in inscribing the emblematic signs of a presence in a fluid and indeterminate space: but that presence - which was the envelope of physical gravity - is captured in its essentiality and, once brought back to the surface, it transforms into the exact reflection of the emotion that promoted it. "
F. Solmi "The visual terms (the image) therefore remain tied to the precarious balance of that contradictory 'logic of the irrational' to which S. referred in the title of one of his books and which can be clearly explained only in the 'improbable' dimension of poetry , precisely in the outcrop of the imbalances, tensions, inconsistencies that are only magically ordered in the plastic and pictorial fact. »
A. Tarantino «By modulating the color, heating a tone, essentialising the line, interrupting the mark, deforming the features, reinforcing the profiles, spatulas with grains with grainy texture, widening the backgrounds, subtly engraving the surfaces, cooling the light, it is able to tune, in a delicate symphony, every relationship between the blocks of the forms represented. »
S. Weiller Romanin Jacur "... S. conducts a close investigation of the figuration, linking up with the postcubist school for a rigorous scan of space, which only a few years ago assumed an almost constricting character of continuous fabric, in which the figure appeared and disappeared at times, punctuated by the repetition of the white spot and of the interrupted curved sign. These characteristics subsequently undergo a sensitive evolution: the fabric thins out, and instead spatial elements of light-color appear, where the scan takes on a linearity defined by large rhythmic spaces ... »
G. Werlen "L'amour porté par yoga le pousse, non vers les Italiens classiques, qui fondent leurs touches l'une dans autre pour éviter l'effet personnel, mais vers les œuvres de nos grand fauves."
Read more about Guido Sgaravatti and other examples from our past in this article.
Antonio Sgaravatti
Sgaravatti Trend Staff
