ABOUT

 


Guido Albanese is an Italian artist born in 1968 in Barletta, Puglia, where he still lives and works.
His research focuses particularly on the natural landscape and elements extrapolated from it, such as clouds and water. The artist focuses on specific details of phenomenological reality suspended in a timeless dimension.
His works are testimonies of places, phenomena, fragments of thoughts and reflections collected in fleeting intuitions, expressed through painting or reworked using digital art. This continues a long tradition of representation and dialogue about nature initiated in past centuries, such as by travelers on the Grand Tour and Romantic painters like Friedrich and Turner.
His favorite subjects are desert areas, mountains, glaciers, volcanoes, and vast cloudscapes. They are imaginary compositions, constructed a priori through a creative process that encompasses multiple disciplines and expressive languages, ranging from painting to photography to digital art.
Thus the corpus of works draws on notes, studies, drawings, photomontages, 3D CGI environments and generative artificial intelligence.


MEDIUM AND TECHNIQUES

Albanese develops his painting through a refined and nuanced experimentation with techniques and languages, in which tradition and innovation meet and intertwine in a continuous evolution.
His references range from the great Renaissance painters, such as Leonardo da Vinci and Giorgione, to traditional Chinese Shan Shui landscape painting. Shan Shui, with its profound philosophical reflections on man and nature, represents a fundamental contribution to his research, which also draws from more recent artists such as Friedrich, Constable, Turner, and De Nittis, while also integrating equally fundamental influences from contemporary artists such as Morandi, de Chirico, Rothko, Burri, Schifano, and Richter.
This research, while drawing on multiple references, is nevertheless characterized by a free synthesis, with the aim of generating a new way of painting, a witness of its time.
His painting adopts a fluid style that oscillates between Romanticism, Realism, and Expressionism, also permeated by influences from Eastern art. His work, far from a Mannerist approach or mere imitation, translates into an imaginary reconstruction of reality, deliberately imprecise and incomplete, which leaves room for free and spontaneous gestures, sometimes verging on abstraction, designed to stimulate the imagination. He mixes and blends techniques such as tonal painting, gestural painting, thick impastos or watercolors, inserting virtuosic touches with minute details and plays of light and shadow with skill that demonstrate refined technical mastery. He also uses rapid and impulsive brushstrokes, splashes, drips, and stains, which contribute to a sense of dynamism and tension. Albanese seeks to convey his thoughts and feelings through maximum expressiveness, creating a visceral and emotional experience, aiming to understand the impulse to knowledge, which for him begins with the experience of wonder at existence itself.

During his artistic evolution, spanning over two decades, Guido Albanese has constantly broadened and deepened his eclectic style, intertwining painting, photography, computer graphics, and, more recently, generative artificial intelligence. For Albanese, this process symbolizes the tension between subjective perception and objective reality and reflects his desire to merge the real with the conceptual in painting.

Potography
Since the beginning of his artistic career, Albanese has often used photography as the basis for his paintings, adopting techniques of layering and alteration to challenge the perception and unambiguous interpretation of images.
Albanese's main influences include Stieglitz, Adams, Ghirri, Sugimoto, Richter, and Schifano.
For the first time, the artist employed photography in the Body series, created in the early 2000s.
These works originate from photographs of real human bodies, which are computer-edited with image-editing software and printed on canvas, before being painted and further transformed. In this series, the human body is represented as an object of exploitation by mass media.
These works already showed the first signs of a conceptual shift, with the progressive dissolution of figures, which gradually gave way to increasingly dominant backgrounds and atmospheres, heralding a new phase of experimentation.
After the Body series was concluded, Albanese, driven by a deepening interest in landscape, began using photography to build an archive dedicated to different typologies—namely, landscapes, skies, and clouds—to use as references for his paintings. Subsequently, these shots gradually took on an independent role, becoming the fulcrum of a parallel aesthetic research aimed at capturing the beauty of ephemeral phenomena, crystallized in a unique moment.
The most significant series of this investigation is Specular Clouds, in which, through digital manipulation, clouds are extrapolated from their landscape context and re-immersed in surreal settings, assuming the role of absolute protagonists. In a delicate balance of light and shadow, the imposing masses of vapor are reflected in vast surfaces of water, evoking sensations of immensity and silent contemplation.
A further expansion of this digital experimentation takes shape in the Enigma series, in which, with the aid of photomontages and CGI integration, the artist photorealistically depicts landscapes partially submerged by water, where gigantic classical sculptures and ancient architecture emerge, generating environments suspended between historical memory and dystopian visions.
Albanese transcends the conventional use of photography. This fusion of techniques and expressive modes reflects his ongoing exploration of new visual languages ​​and their interconnections, aiming to expand interpretative and sensorial possibilities and offer a more immersive visual experience that stimulates creativity and imagination. This approach allows the artist to transform photography into a dynamic and multifunctional medium, moving beyond static images and introducing movement and audio experimentation.

CGI
2D and 3D computer graphics, known as CGI (Computer-Generated Imagery), is the other major component of Albanese's artistic research. He began to develop an interest in this field in the early 2000s, fascinated primarily by the potential of creating photorealistic images and processing three-dimensional objects and spaces, simulating physical reality. From there, he began using various software, which are now widely used in the creation of special effects (VFX) for film, television, advertising, and video games. In his case, however, he uses these techniques for purely artistic research. His goal is to create the illusion of imaginary atmospheres and environments that evoke a surreal and timeless dimension.
This led, for example, to the creation of the series Free Forms, Blob Forms, and Fluid Forms, inspired by the theme of water and fluidity. Three-dimensional animations featuring intertwining luminous lines or fluid matter that float in an aseptic void, creating unpredictable entanglements and interplays of solids and voids that recall the Japanese aesthetic concept of yohaku no-bi, the beauty of emptiness and incompleteness.
Beyond these more abstract works, there are also works dedicated to landscapes, such as the aforementioned Specular Clouds and Enigma series, or the "Indefinite Landscape" series, where, in a large, dark room resembling a movie theater, giant photographs of primitive landscapes, or cloudscapes, appear on the back wall, reflected in a floor flooded with a kind of viscous liquid resembling petroleum. In these works, the artist aims to stimulate a contemplative and introspective experience of the natural world.
Added to these works are the photorealistic 3D virtual environments of the "The Impossible Exhibition" series, which arose from the artist's need to view his own works in a space similar to that of an art gallery, with the aim of observing and evaluating their effect as a spectator, in a more objective and detached way.

Generative artificial intelligence
In recent years, Albanese has experimented with an innovative integration of traditional painting, digital photography, and computer graphics, expanding his artistic language with the inclusion of generative artificial intelligence. Images from his paintings are digitally merged with his archival photographs of real or AI-generated landscapes, as in the series on Glaciers, Volcanoes, Deserts, and Storms from the large-scale series entitled Another World. In other works, he creates hybrids based on personal photographic reportages dedicated to ancient artworks, as in Caput Mundi, a series dedicated to the beauties of ancient Rome. The final result is works that oscillate between figurative and abstract, with intense, acid-tinged hues; particularly vivid and often unnatural color combinations and tones, characterized by strong contrasts and extreme color saturations. These colors evoke an artificial visual sensation, psychedelic and unnatural fluorescent tones, reminiscent of the intensity of chemical pigments or industrial dyes. Furthermore, during the computer manipulation phase, the artist attempts to partially destroy the image through unexpected distortions generated by digital or analog problems, such as software, hardware, or compression malfunctions known in the art jargon as "glitches." This is complemented by digital toning and overlays of gestural brushstrokes, which further transform and transfigure the landscape.
Collectively, these works explore multiple forms: from the transcendent relationship with photography that goes beyond simple visual experience, to atmospheric transfigurations that evoke Turner's painting in a modern key, as a full expression of light and color, in which forms dissolve and representation becomes increasingly abstract until it surpasses the concrete experience of nature, generating an ambivalent dialogue between realism and non-objectivity, reality and appearance.
The final production phase of these works is intended for video panels, LED walls, projection systems (Video Mapping) and limited edition prints, which in some cases are further enriched manually by the artist after printing, with the use of acrylic colors and varnishes.

EDUCATION AND TRAINING
After studying set design at the Fine Arts Academies of Florence and Bari, Guido Albanese completed his education in 1994 with a specialization in set and costume design at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan.

His professional career began in Paris, where he collaborated as a concept artist with renowned set designer Ezio Frigerio, and continued in Milan alongside other prominent designers. Over time, driven by a desire to broaden his expressive horizons, he turned to the study of computer graphics and rediscovered painting—two fields that would become increasingly central to his artistic research, eventually merging and prevailing in his later development.

In the early 2000s, he began a more conscious and personal aesthetic investigation, experimenting with the combination of traditional artistic techniques and digital tools, with the aim of fostering cross-contamination and new expressive forms. His early influences include Abstract Expressionism, Art Informel, and Pop Art. Later, an in-depth study of Renaissance painting and Eastern art led him to a deliberate return to traditional painting, enriched by modern experience and deeply shaped by the formal synthesis and gestural style typical of East Asian ink painting—particularly Chinese shuǐmòhuà and Japanese sumi-e.

In parallel, photography and digital art developed as independent yet closely connected domains, creating a silent and coherent dialogue with painting, oriented toward exploring the profound relationship between human beings and nature. Each medium becomes a distinct perceptual channel, a different way of listening to and interpreting the world.

In 2003, he was awarded the Special Prize “Camera di Commercio” at Pavia Giovane Arte Europea, sponsored by the Lombardy Region and chaired by Rossana Bossaglia. In 2006, he received another Special Prize at the Premio Nazionale di Pittura e Scultura Città di Novara, with a jury chaired by Michelangelo Pistoletto, for his innovative use of new technologies. In 2010, he was a finalist in the Photography section of the 4th Arte Laguna International Prize in Venice.

Since 2015, after more than a decade of cross-disciplinary experience in fields such as web design, interior design, and editorial illustration, he has focused exclusively on painting and digital art.

In 2023, he began an artistic collaboration with CINELLO UNLIMITED, an online gallery dedicated to contemporary digital art. In 2024, he was selected as a finalist for the Be Natural Be Wild art competition in Biella.

EXHIBITIONS

  • 2005 – Inkiostro, group show, Chiostro di S. Paolo, Ferrara

  • 2006 – L’inquietudine, group show, Milan (Fondazione D’Ars)

  • 2010 – Finalist exhibition, 4th Arte Laguna Prize, Venice

  • 2024 – Finalist exhibition, Be Natural Be Wild, Biella (4th edition)


AWARDS AND PRIZES

  • 2003 – Pavia – Young European Art, Special Award “Chamber of Commerce”

  • 2004 – Celeste Award, 1st Edition, San Gimignano

  • 2004 – National Award for Painting and Sculpture – City of Novara, Merit Plaque

  • 2005 – Mention, Celeste Prize, 2nd Edition, San Gimignano

  • 2006 – Special Prize from the Artistic Direction, City of Novara

  • 2010 – Finalist, 4th Arte Laguna Prize, Photography section

  • 2024 – Finalist, Be Natural Be Wild art competition, Painting section


PUBLICATIONS

  • 2005 – National Award for Painting and Sculpture – City of Novara, catalogue, p.18

  • 2005 – Celeste Prize, catalogue, Painting Medium section, p.55

  • 2006 – City of Novara, catalogue, p.19

  • 2010 – 4th Arte Laguna Prize – Venice, catalogue, p.142

  • 2024 – Be Natural Be Wild – 4th Edition, Biella, catalogue, p.90

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