He graduated from a first level degree from Venice’s Accademia di belle arti in 2002 and took his second level degree in visual arts and performance disciplines in 2007 with a graphic art specialisation. In 2007 he worked as assistant tutor in calcographic technique under Professor G.Bortolo Fantinato. In 2009 he obtained teaching accreditation in the A/021 category. In 2010 he won a study bursary offered by the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw for a further training course in lithography and graphic art. In 2010 he won the Rome Accademia di Belle Arti’s engraving design chair. In 2010/11 he was part of Associazione Incisori Veneti. He has sat on the Monsummano Terme International Biennial Engraving Award’s examining commission since 2015. He is currently teaching at Liceo Artistico G. De Fabris di Nove (VI). He lives and works in Cornedo in Vicenza province.
Veneto engraver Giuseppe Vigolo won the 5th Monsummano Terme International Biennial Engraving Award having demonstrated notable mastery of the drypoint technique, a direct technique which takes advantage of the soft profiles created by the ink filled hairs. It is a very elegant graphic technique producing fine chiaroscuro effects of great importance for the aesthetic, painterly result which the young artist was evidently seeking. This is what Vigolo wrote to me when I tried to explore his poetic and asked him to introduce himself: I do “portraits of ordinary people, people we meet every day walking along the pavements which take us to work or the bus stop or a tube stop, people we know nothing of except what they reveal of themselves in that moment, attracting our attention to that fleeting revealed truth. This is the truth I look for in my subjects. Not a simple depiction but a revelation. The creativity of an artist depicting a face can be understood as a research tool to externalise what that face conceals deep down. That face which is modelled from the starting point of inwardness transformed into expression. The face, glance, expression, features - these are important clues to inner life which are revealed and laid bare by means of it. The soul is indefinable and immaterial and all the same constitutes a fundamental difference between the pure expression documented by a subject and his or her portrait. Signs are understanding the truth tools by which the most secret urgings of the soul are revealed. Portraits are the doubling up of the narrated ‘I’, a mirror to the emotions that show through. In my recent work I cut up and put back together again the faces of my subjects, details from the same person, an excerpt from the story told, a nuance of that ‘I’ told in ongoing evolution and discovery as I like”.
mm 795x685