He is good at gorillas. He has been painting them since 2002, when he created the first series of animal paintings that would then figure in the 2008 exhibition “Safari.”
For Riccardo Gavazzi, however, the animals are a pretext for the exploration of form; the variety in their bodies fascinates him, with their form allowing for greater freedom of expression and experimentation than he would find in human portraiture.
In animals Gavazzi sees matter and colour; envisages the challenge of taking the brutal and making it desirable. He chooses painting here because it, too, is a primitive gesture —like cooking; it is life itself. In painting this giant ape — which naturally calls up memories of King Kong — the artist experiences the sense of velocity and power in his own body; he establishes a carnal, human, relation with the space around him. The result is a sort of script in which the story of the work becomes the work itself. In this picture for Fabbri, the company logo forms part of a Pop background while the blond Ann Darrow is replaced by the white-and-blue jar typical of Amarena sweets. The result is a particularly felicitous blend of cinematic and pictorial action.