Born into a family of modest means, Landini emigrated at the age of eight with his parents to the south of France. His early training then took place in the French secular culture that was undoubtedly important in defining his personality. Upon his return to Pistoia from France in 1939, Landini enrolled at the ginnasio (middle school) and began taking painting lessons from the Pistoia artist Umberto Mariotti. At the age of sixteen, his cultural references were Piero della Francesca, Matisse, and Monet who, for Landini, were the initiators of modern painting. Only after the war was Landini introduced to Pistoia’s lively artistic world, in particular to Alfiero Cappellini who fascinated him and led him to a personal exploration of intense cultural motivation. Even in those years of realism, Landini believed, with great ideological enthusiasm, in facts and the immanence of reality. In 1945 he exhibited for the first time, together with Cappellini, at the Galleria La Porta in Florence. In 1950, Landini graduated with Roberto Longhi from the Faculty of Letters in Florence with a thesis on Umberto Boccioni. He moved immediately afterwards to Paris, where he worked as a correspondent for the magazine Paragone. It was a period of his great interest in French painting and his prolific activity as an art critic, with articles on Picasso, Villon, the Cubists, and Dufy dating to this period. Again thanks to his relationship with Longhi, Landini began to frequent the Roman milieu, making the acquaintance of Renato Guttuso and Antonello Trombadori. Nevertheless, his work caused differences on the socialist realism front as Landini's realism was too far removed from its directives and programmatic requirements as well as heading too much towards satisfying a personal exploration. In fact, Landini seemed to have been distancing himself from Marxist ideology since 1956, imposing a more critical attitude and outlining an interest in informal art and such artists as Rothko, Pollock, and De Staël. Landini dedicated an important article in “Paragone” to De Staël, the first in Italy to draw attention to this artist. Again in 1956, he decided to devote himself entirely to painting. Abandoning his work as a critic, Landini returned to Italy to work as a French teacher, moving to Milan in 1958. There, he began to explore emotional non-figurative painting where reality is perceived in fragments from psychological stress. The works have an intense chromatic concentration showing more proximity to De Staël’s painting. The new experience resulted in an exhibition at the Galleria il Milione, arousing profound interest in the Milanese cultural setting. His works from the late 1960s contain an interest in facts. Visual perception was expressed in images recounting fragments of life. In addition, Landini worked at recovering single-color sequences that were then recomposed into a whole by freely interpreting Robert Rauschenberg’s art. From the 1980s and 1990s, reality in Landini’s works is once again form, color, and light in a continuous movement that goes from the figurative to a more interiorized sign towards a painting with strongly material results. The Breda company club dedicated the 2012 San Giorgio Prize to Lando Landini and organized an exhibition in Pistoia’s former church of San Giovanni.
(Rocks of Garraf) Throughout Landini’s artistic career, he utilized alternating languages that intersected and overlapped to enable him to open up sometimes to a visually faithful rigor and sometimes to a freer gesture, abandoned to diverse emotional situations. He himself recognized this “coming and going” of his as the awareness that one cannot be compelled by living in reality. Landini described his sense of pictorial creation as a “point of contrast and intersection between individual instances of expression and requests to share in a reality that multiplies and exalts our human experience” (cf. L. Landini, “La mostra di De Staël a Parigi”, in “Paragone”, No. 79, 1956). Landini never painted from life. Rocce di Garraf (Rocks of Garraf) is also a work from memory. Reality becomes a pretext. It is the starting point for a depiction of feelings, a free vision, and a concept of painting developed by impressionism where the painter works in terms of a vibrant luminosity using relatively pure pictorial material. Rocce di Garraf, a work from 1971, reveals the artist's interest in color and form, an aspect that had always fascinated him since his early years as an artist when he identified the painting of Monet and Matisse as signposts.
mm 410x300
(Sacred Wood) This black-charcoal drawing was made by the artist in 1991. The title is symbolic as it contains an element taken from a real context but transported into a contemplation suspended between knowledge and poetic insight. The drawing’s small, nuanced lines merely evoke the idea of a group of trees, with many patches alternating between positive and negative spaces, where memory again creates the image content.
mm 750x1100
Etching made by Lando Landini in 1994 for the portfolio commissioned by the Associazione Industriali della Provincia di Pistoia, “1944-1994: 50 anni di Lavoro”. “With hatching, chiaroscuro, and nebulous figures, Landini renders the idea of human labor with sensations similar to expressionism.” Umberto Castelli, editor of “1944-1994: 50 anni di Lavoro”, the portfolio produced by the Associazione degli industriali della Provincia di Pistoia, analyzed Landini’s work and highlighted the master’s style in a few words. A nude male figure seen from behind walks towards a cottage on the edge of a wood. The image is rendered with a disjointed line. A barely defined landscape is also depicted, with the spaces wrapped in a sort of veiled decomposition. The observer is caught by the desire to seek in those shadows, the secrets, silences, and melancholy of places and of their very existence. As in his paintings, Landini’s graphics also demonstrate an interest in Soutine that pushed him towards less uniform, but always solid forms in a constant exploration of the material. In Landini, there is a clear-cut propensity towards pictorial quality that he did not recognize in color or mark, but rather in the emphasis on the chromatism and chiaroscuro, achieved as a result of the use of mingling and overlapping lines and the sooty contrasts that use shadows to create an undefined reality that pushes towards musings that emerge not from observation but from experience.
mm 321x246