Italo Petreni

Italo Petreni was born in Colle val d’Elsa, where he lives and works in the heart of Tuscany. His work is reflected in the attention to details and the love with which he captures the vast panoramas of the rolling green hills of the countryside around Siena. After the experimentations in youth within the informal currents, he comes to figurative painting reproducing the Tuscan landscapes: motif which has become the cornerstone of his research the last twenty years. In these works the inspiration of Renaissance landscapes is notable. The compositions are precise and rigorously planned out and they represent hills divided by wide valleys and landscapes where the eye is ravished by the depth of the sky. His tuscan paintings, not exempt from post-Macchiaioli echoes, celebrate the rural environment across brilliant relationships between light and colour, imbuing the compositions with harmony by means of a certain lightness which emanates the joining of complementary tones. It is in this way that his extraordinary representations of vast flowered meadows and cultivated fields immersed in the summer’s heat take form. Italo Petreni’s landscapes never include the human form: in his works man is the spectator who is amazed by the painter’s game of rustic nature, and the artifice of painting evokes in him hidden sentiments and bucolic sensations. It’s possible found his works in many public and private collections, in Italy and abroad.