A selection of opinions from art historians, critics and experts on the works of Luigi Settembrini.
A shadow of mystery pervades Luigi Settembrini’s recent works. The artist works in both painting and set design, obtaining notable and flattering recognition in both areas.
His works range between the abstract and informal multi-medium, where color, particularly dense and bright, defines backgrounds with unusual and unexpected geometry, in which the author’s explicit yearning to leave a strong emotional impact is plain to see.
Nor do his long and certain brushstrokes leave us indifferent, tracing lattices and sections with deliberately irregular outlines, particularly notable for their light, their warm and enveloping light.
Luigi Settembrini’s paintings are also characterized by a soft melancholic vein, especially when the spatiality of his works is expressed in shades that are modulated by a narrative process that reveal forms and details that reflect a sensitive reality, albeit in a specular way, to the spectator’s eyes, with great meta-narrative sensibility.
We thus stand before an artist who – with great conviction – proposes a painting style permeated by a need for continuous renewal that is able to attract a truly diverse audience.
The words of Maestro Renzo Bianchi ring particularly true for Luigi Settembrini: “A real artist is one who does not reveal himself immediately, but allows himself be discovered.”
Simone Fappanni
Artist Luigi Settembrini builds his reflections on new, hyper-contemporary realities as sources of creative impulses and utopias.
The compositions of structures and spaces that he obtains from overlapping lines, segments and shapes are practically infinite, as everything travels in a high voltage universe. It is in this ars combinatoria that the artist’s possibilities to explore lie, without failing to mention the strong tactile impact created by color.
To tell the truth, the project is more important than the finished result as it is the intention behind the deign that lends the object a sense of mystery and apprehension, leaving the observer the opportunity to complete it with their own deductions.
His works are charged with need for physical contact with the observers themselves in order to fully communicate the emotions imprisoned by its marked, plastically sculpted contours.
Michele Miulli
The “gash” in Luigi Settembrini’s works is no longer an “elaboration of hypotheses on space.” Here, it is the “ash that we live with, the social gash of our times that every individual feels within, the feeling of our souls yearning for a more cohesive society with universal values.
What we can get a glimpse of in the marked opening of these true “lacerations,” as if they were carnal lacerations that slice through both the general social fabric and urban aggregates, where urban communities try to live and coexist.
Social contexts that are purposely disintegrated and kept separate through strong lines of demarcation, from the so-called “inaccessible zones” protected by fences.
Within these areas we may also observe deep trenches, which may only be crossed by ropes, into which only the daring allow themselves to fall.
Alongside the lines of demarcation, we may also observe the so-called borderline areas, or “transition zones” that come near to social contexts, but in a protected manner to limit the dangers of potential contact.
The “dead-end” alleyways of “closed” contexts are juxtaposed with wide streets that almost meet the sky, colored and presented differently, that travel above our social contexts and escape control, as if to reiterate the “random” force that nature has also, fortunately, established in human relationships.
Stefano Tomaselli
Luigi Settembrini’s works move within the sphere of experimentation, with connotations of delicate lyricism.
The artist organizes space according to geometric modules into which threads and fragments of different materials are inserted, creating a mysterious and essential design.
The artist uses dark and intense red backgrounds (Le diversità elettive – Ida y vuelta) sometimes applied with dense brushstrokes characterized by almost plastic vibrations, and other times with a smooth surface of slight nuances, or tone on tone, from which the fragments are free to emerge from the composition.
Settembrini travels down a path of conceptuality, placing the observer in front of enigmas, allowing them to take possession of the clues laid out by the composer, to examine them and find confirmations, intentions and meanings in an open question.
Paolo Levi
Luigi Settembrini’s artistic research examines precarious tenso-dynamic balances.
Using a myriad of threadlike strokes connected to a mysterious and troubling origin in a silent vision of hallucinated twists and turns the artist demonstrates a freedom from traditional composition.
Overcoming obvious communicative methods, Settembrini creates a fine balance between gestural temporalities and executive choices.
A delicate relationship between time and matter creates a virtual bridge between past experiences and the artist’s visions of the future.
Anna Maria Giugni & Gianluigi Guarneri
Luigi Settembrini’s works, rich in bold monochromatic elements, illustrate textual considerations that are otherwise silenced.
Excruciating lacerations and upheavals of surfaces are brought together again with tenacious welding to restore their experiences, wounds recomposed on the vertical plane of the support of the human soul.
Paradoxical tensions are once again “halted” by desires to rebuild and be satisfied that have survived the time revisited, wise to the upheaval of the dark weight of the experienced historic past, symbolic memories present in the signs, not satisfied with necessary constructions ready to arise, far from false renovations, rich with new harmony with the hopeful and indomitable civilization in the making.
An assumption that is indifferent to false illusions of new fabrics without a past, but rich in the determination to be.
Thus, the wounds in Settembrini’s works speak of a conscious sensation of enrichment through a vigorously significant vital projection beyond pessimism.
A clear message of wisdom supports the idea that art can blend with multiple languages.
Alessandra Lucia Coruzzi
A careful use of color and bright expressive tones characterizes the work of Luigi Settembrini, an eclectic artist of indubitable artistic ability, who works in painting and set design.
His paintings on a geometric and reticulated layout contain warm multi-tonal harmonies and cold, melancholic monochromatic stretches, where plastic form brings the work out from its compact material individuality, forcing it to physically interact with the observer.
The process of alienation from a phenomenal reality leads us into an enchanted and mysterious and atemporal world where the artist’s inner thoughts are expressed in concentric lines and deep colors in which everything seems to be frozen in its essentiality, in an abstract form, purified by the conceptual relativity.
This and more can be found in the works of Luigi Settembrini, who believes in continuous experimentation to go beyond stereotypes to offer original, personal art.
Marco Filippa