"Etruscan Stele"

GIORGIO VAIANI LISI

Giorgio Vaiani Lisi was born in Arezzo in 1978. From an early age, he was lucky enough to be surrounded by beauty. Together with his father, an antiques dealer, he grew up visiting fairs, markets and museums; with his grandfather, a gallery owner, he attended the studios of artists such as Santomaso and Dorazio, Maccari and Guidi. After studying languages at high school, he chose Conservation of Cultural Heritage at the University, following the courses of Antonio Paolucci (at the time Director of the Polo Museale Fiorentino and formerly Minister of Cultural Heritage, recently Director of the Vatican Museums), Marco Ciatti (Director of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence) and Professor Rossana Buono, Germano Celant's collaborator: in his Contemporary Art History course, he studied Arte Povera, Informal and Conceptual Art, and was deeply impressed. He is also interested in subjects such as archaeology, palaeontology, semiology and symbolism. Artistically self-taught, Giorgio Vaiani Lisi began painting and sculpting around the age of twenty, but this activity remained private for a long time. His first publicly exhibited works date from 2012, material works with an informal matrix that range from painting to sculpture. The exploration of matter is the focus of his work from the very beginning. Equally important is the sign and symbolist aspect, which began to emerge in 2015, the year in which he arrived at compositions of signs that take the form of real cryptic alphabets, set on material backgrounds (the Crypticvs series).        In the same period, he devoted himself to the study of the languages of ancient civilisations, in particular the Etruscan language, and in 2016 he presented the Etruscan Memories cycle, focusing on the symbolic and evocative aspect of the Etruscan language, represented through paintings and sculptures that are strongly material and dense with graphic signs, works that combine expressive power and visual purity, arousing in the viewer a sensation of temporal suspension. Giorgio Vaiani Lisi's works are versatile, linked by the presence of letters, words, signs and symbols used as conceptual tools to connect different subjects and contexts, through the use of a variety of techniques, supports and materials, from the most noble to recycled ones. He has exhibited several times at the Piero Della Francesca Art Gallery, the first in 2012, in the Arte Materica exhibition, and in the following years, from 2016 to 2024, his works have been shown in group exhibitions and trade fair events, at important international galleries, such as Casati Contemporary Art Gallery in Monza (together with Aubertin, Perilli, Scanavino), Style Gallery in Paris and Zhao Contemporary in Shenyang, China (where he exhibited alongside artists of the calibre of Hsiao Chin and Tsai Hsia Ling). The art historian Lucia Scatragli, the Chinese critic Li Xiu and the Umbrian poet Evaristo Seghetta Andreoli, the poet who has written about him: ‘Giorgio Vaiani Lisi, a young painter but with a fine and consolidated experience in his art, versatile and inclined as he is to the ingenious dexterity for the plastic arts, could only be born in Arezzo, the city of “Mecenas atavis edite regibus” (Maecenas descending from ancient kings) of Horace's memory. Well, ‘Rasna’ (Etruscan) blood flows in Giorgio because the reading he is giving to his ancestral sensations could only take us back to that particular world for refinement and taste that was that of the Etruscans. Giorgio Vaiani Lisi endeavours in the modern re-presentation of the Tyrrhenian vases, with the dark colour that tastes of oxidation, of black and brown bucchero, only he brings it back on canvas, therefore on a flat surface, more readable, more scenic. He enriches that ocean of bas-relief waves with letters of the Etruscan alphabet in patinated and filigreed antique gold. This artist takes us back to the nights of the cities of the dodecapolis and plays with the souls of the two thousand to remind us that beauty and mystery are timeless.’ Giorgio Vaiani Lisi lives and works in Arezzo.