Never has there been so much talk of art and artists as in our times. And yet, disconcertingly, never as in our times has the concept of art seemed so distant from those prerogatives and those significant values that marked its history, at least until the years after the Second World War. Recklessly downsized by a society of which it had long been a substantial element, sharing in its moments of growth and its periods of decadence, today art no longer plays that decisive social and cultural role that saw it take center stage for centuries. The contemporary artistic lexicon, on the contrary, has been enriched with new terms and manifold creative expressions: performances, installations, grand events, and then fairs and exhibitions and colossal shows, which have certainly contributed to a mass diffusion of artists and movements, but which at the same time risk decreeing their emptying of meaning and their superficial spectacularization. Art has thus found itself at the center of a veritable economic system of which it is, by turns, object and subject: usually accessory and decorative, a sophisticated intellectual diversion for connoisseurs, it appears today ever more separated from the social fabric and, likewise, an inattentive witness to this slow drift that our years have become. What has suffered the consequences, over the last half century, of an obstinate and shortsighted intention to burn the bridges with a tradition and a past considered useless (the exhausted and worn-out legacy of the historical avant-gardes, back in fashion in the nineteen-sixties), has above all been painting.
Wiped out by minimalism first and by the long conceptual wave afterward, dismissed offhandedly, and with casual presumption, as obsolete, and long relegated to the margins of artistic debate, for some time now, however, we have observed figurative painting (together with an unusual transversal development of languages and tendencies, the fruit of cultural globalization and, perhaps, of not too well concealed market interests) return vigorously to make its appearance in the galleries and in the great international surveys, with outcomes and variations that are, to be sure, most often debatable.
I close these notes here: for years I have considered what happens in the contemporary artistic panorama with a gaze that is, despite myself, realistic and disenchanted, but also with the profound conviction that art is still today, notwithstanding the opaque horizons of the present, an extraordinary adventure of the spirit, an instrument offered to us to draw closer to categories of thought perhaps little frequented today.

For this reason, when I met Riccardo Secchi (one afternoon in March of last year I went to visit an exhibition of his, curated and pointed out to me by Emidio De Albentiis), I once again had the certainty that artistic work, the authentic, patient, and impassioned kind, carried out in silence and which, as Rilke wrote, is born of inner necessities and does not seek at all costs the favor of the public and the appreciation of the critics, is a sort of vocation that is given to us and that, as such, must be followed with attention and constancy, despite the difficulties and the obstacles and the moments of creative pause. I do not intend to attempt a critical analysis of Secchi's work: from our meeting a friendship was born that, in times like these of superficial and approximate relationships, I consider a rare and precious thing, and that therefore suggests to me a less technical and more personal reading of Riccardo's paintings.
Born in Reggio Emilia into a family rich in artistic inclinations (his grandfather was a leading sculptor in his city and, though in different times and ways, his uncle and his father too devoted themselves, with good results, to art), Riccardo Secchi moved to Perugia in 1973. After secondary school he enrolled in the painting course of the Academy of Fine Arts, attending, among others, the classes of Father Diego Donati and Bruno Orfei, and graduated in 1978. It was to those years that his acquaintance and association with William Congdon goes back, a prominent figure of postwar American painting, who lived in Assisi and Subiaco at a significant moment of his own artistic and existential story, from whom Secchi would receive fundamental teachings about art and the craft of art, teachings that would prove essential to his own work: a synthetic vision of the pictorial subject, which is built up in large fields of color, laid on with a spatula on wooden panels. After a period of activity and experience also and above all in the field of artistic ceramics, Secchi devoted himself exclusively to teaching, taking up painting again regularly only in 2004.

Now, in a society and a cultural context like ours, where the feats of ever more precocious talents are celebrated daily, this is undoubtedly surprising: it takes true passion for painting and great determination to accept the challenge, to put oneself back into play at fifty and to resume from where one had left off. But art has its own timing, which does not correspond to chronological age, and it sometimes points us toward unexpected trajectories that, in order to be traveled, require temperament and commitment. Sincere passion, temperament, and determination are not lacking in Secchi. He starts again from landscape, rendered with firmness and a broad expressive gesture, certainly mindful of Congdon's lesson, but rethought through an original compositional freedom and a particular, vigorous use of chromatic ranges that find delicate and precarious yet highly effective balances in the pictorial narration. The vistas are those of the places where Riccardo lives: Perugia, the Umbrian countryside, Lake Trasimeno, or, more rarely, the horizons of Emilia and Lombardy. In his painting we find nothing but the apparently simple datum of the reality that surrounds us and within which we have been called to live our stories: but precisely this, in my opinion, is the most engaging aspect of his painting. There are no visual hyperboles, inventions, allegories: the hills, the mountains, the olive trees, the plowed fields are there, evoked by the resolute and explicit action of the spatula, which allows no finishing touches or detailed descriptions, interpreted by the sensibility of Secchi, who recounts their silences, their vast expanses, their seasons.
The painting is then no longer a conventional mimetic illustration of the real but, through the pictorial gesture, each time unique and unrepeatable, it becomes a personal reading of the world.
In Trasimeno con cielo nuvoloso, for example, the shores of the lake and the hills, built with broad, decisive strokes, mark off water and clouds that confront each other in a luminescent thickening of grays and greens: from the intense experience of the visible there surfaces, as if from remote ages, the primordial force of nature in which the presence of the divine has always resounded, absolute.
In the series of portraits too that Secchi has produced in recent years we find again the same immediacy and energy of his other paintings, and together with it the same slight, absorbed suspension: faces of ordinary people, caught in habitual attitudes but which perhaps, precisely for this reason, fully express the precious multiplicity that each person carries, in any case, within.
Far from fashions and revivals, the landscapes and, more recently, the portraits, are certainly well planted in the European painting tradition but reveal a frank and independent temperament. If I had to find references or models (formal ones only, of course), I would not know where to look for them. Perhaps in some works one appreciates a constructive quality in whose solidity Cézanne's lesson can be recognized (Subasio, Campi a Montemelino), or in some others the skillful use of ranges of browns and grays recalls certain Sironian palettes (Interno di San Pietro), or, again, the uninhibited exploration of ample gradations of primary colors may perhaps evoke the Fauve adventure; then, certainly, the mastery of Congdon, which Secchi, however, as has been noted, works over with a language and sensibility of his own, until he reaches a personal and mature idiom that allows him to pursue an expressive research that is, it is worth emphasizing, always convincing and rigorous.

To Riccardo Secchi's pictorial heritage, in fact, visual excess, the eye-catching flourish, does not belong. We do not find the technical expedient that makes perspective more incisive, distances more nuanced, tones more attractive. Everything is pared to the bone, governed by an essential grammar of signs and colors that reveal a poetry happily spare and effective.
To a more attentive gaze there then emerges, from Riccardo's works, a large part of his inner world, where a broad and free vision of reality is accompanied by a spiritual need that is profound and lived out with coherence.
Thus, the encounter with a solitary factory ruin, a sign of the modern at its twilight, reminds us, in its bygone grandeur, of the ancient dignity of labor, of the hopes, the dreams, and the uncertainties of a humanity forever stretched between the awareness of the provisional and the need for the transcendent. And again, in the apparent simplicity of a sky and a horizon immersed in the light of a summer afternoon, one perceives the subdued and at the same time overwhelming beauty of nature, the light and sublime breath of creation, the certainty of far vaster temporal cadences that loom over the urgency of our existences.