LUIGI MEREGALLI

It’s in the water’s nature to flow, to slip untouchable and impossible to circumscribe. And when, finally, it stands still, water changes showing its emptiness and vagueness to the eye. For such a behaviour and status pheraps it’s seen as the cradle of life, the way to achieve purification and a centre of regeneration. When the water meets the color, the alliance is as hardest as it could ever be. Few can manage and follow water’s temper and fully understand its faint frontiers, indistincted as they are with the whole horizon. Luigi Meregalli is a watercolour master. His landscapes and shapes take form from the soft brush’s sediments on the paper. Landscapes and shapes lose their physical firmness, to almost became unreal. They are life’s settings seized from the mind well before the eye, and by the mind filtered till they became the works that, one day after the other, take shape from the artist’s strokes. Every work is a unique breath of life, in which light is a valuable aid. Bystander is placed facing but also living inside the work. And the work is an eyes wide open dream. Water can melt every border, makes it pervious. It’s allowed to get in the work and what’s inside it can easily get out. Everything is played on a stage that allows imagination to take place as the same time with factual reality. It is a tough technique to master, but Luigi Meregalli proves to be at home with it, taking us to a trip through ever changing worlds. Nowadays he performs gentle forays into the world of acrylic, using strong and emotional landscapes to achieve and fullfill his works.

PAINTED POETRY

With an immediate and irresistible power, Luigi Meregalli’s work is able to contact the observer: as a poem where the wise signs, as allusive words, reveal atmospheres, thoughts, moods. We don’t find in the works only a nostalgic lyricism, that sometimes seems the only tone, people ascribe to the watercolour. There’re, in Meregalli’s painting, outstanding, suspending atmospheres and slight instants, those seem to dissolve every clot of concreteness. There’re the peaceful beauty too, in bright landscapes and open skies or in secret foreshortenings and corners, those tell about moments of melancholy. But other works (especially the most recent ones) strike us with a dramatic strenght, with a sense of oppression, that shows through views of suburbs or trees, those burn and lighten towards anguished skies. This evolution doesn’t appear in a more expert technic (it always has been refined), but in the inquiry about a new, true and more dramatic way to communicate. New colours, reinterpreted signs tell us about a restless soul, an uninterrupted testing of unusual methods, original codes to construct a deep dialogue: as the artist wants to tell us his emotion looking at what he has seen, not to describe it. To express more than to display.

LA THE WEAVING OF A PRECIOUS LACE

Luigi Meregalli has travelled throughout all watercolour fields and has uncovered a heart capable of perceiving all the nuances which stem from the blending of water and colour, transparency and reflection. Meregalli can be said to have explored every path watercolours can lead to. Watercolours have told the artist all their secrets and potentials. He has experienced the mist of the plain of Lombardy and the warmth of the verdant Garda Lake. He has walked the narrow streets and wards of Venice and has always searched for the poetic and evocative nature of all these places. Meregalli has woven a thick weft resembling a precious lace made of images and of what his colours weave, invent and re-create. Our eyes perceive a new world to discover with the artist’s same astonishment and wonder because his paintings invite us to enter a visual suggestion which expands into emotions and becomes history. Luigi Meregalli has enriched the spectrum of his colour nuances and has extended the perimeter of the painting to the meanders of liquidity. He has laid stress on the image depth, thus achieving seductive results and is now ready to set off for a new creative journey into his "visual Poetry".

Meregalli’s works, beside their figurative approach, do not merely dwell upon descriptions. Evoking and informal poetry is the result of the artist’s mastery of his watercolours.

THE SHARP DESIRE TO PERCEIVE

Luigi Meregalli takes us by the hand and leads us into a world made of tangled bushes and trees, clear waters, paths across the country. Every Meregalli’s work is a journey into a friendly and serene nature moulded by the man. Contrary to what may happen in a city or in a forest, getting lost in this nature is almost impossible. “Losing oneself in a city the same as in a forest is hard to learn since the names of the streets need to sound as the creaking of dead wood to the wanderer’s ear and the inner lanes need to clearly beat the time of the hours passing by just as gorges do.” Walter Benjamin, in “infanzia berlinese”. Even though the destination is unknown, the artist offers the certainty of a safe journey thanks to the encouraging and gentle atmosphere of the landscapes. The public walks at a light step staring widely and deeply and breathes the air of the heart of life. These gently modelled landscapes arouse questions and subtle uneasiness, yet they do not cause anxiety. They just spur the sharp desire to perceive. It took Meregalli long years and patience to create this poetic world and to refine his knowledge of watercolouring.

…Meregalli is really a watercolourist of ancient touch, his expressive key is borrowed from far readings. His touch is absorbed and impressive where the colour should remain impressed on the surface, while it’s unstrained and pale where the atmospherical background suggests to enlarge the tone-masses. Meregalli knows his figurative role very well and he moves away from its borders toward a shrewd abstraction.

…Luigi Meregalli is in love with nature and his lyrical images unwind on the soft notes of watercolours. The country is lived from the depth with a gentle and romantic soul in a lyric dimension. The technique is very fine and its shades and marblings are fresh also in the most difficult backlights and in some chromatic efflorescences. Everything becomes tenderly sentimental: melancholy is really the effusion of a dreaming and crepuscular soul.

…nature is narrated with the trembling and elegant touch of watercolours through quiet assonances and sweet colour’s vibrations. Luigi Meregalli turns landscape-views into pale outlines that change their chromatic aspect according to the atmospheric light. Tonalities wind on the paper and spread in a multitude of shades, dimming images and dissolving their structure. The most restless soul calms down in these paintings; the sensation of tranquillity and peace shrouds everything.

…Luigi Meregalli is an artist who has found the starting point for a research of the emotional dimension in nature, its rhythms and its colours. He usually paints with watercolours and he’s able to dominate this technique with skill, obtaining communicative, tender and intangible results, similar to the atmospheres from which he takes inspiration.