Ettore Racca

Michelina Celentano

CINEMATIC SUGGESTION
Ettore Racca starts his artistic career in 1972. From the beginning of his activity he has always pursued a continuous and stubborn research for renewal and originality, whose main features have been reached in 1978.

His work is characterized by a diagonal vigorous sign, first informal, and then sped up and made more dynamic, vibrant and able to make shape perceptible while passing through it.

In Racca's style, Shape, first composed in its actual configuration, is then broken down and crushed through a quick, repeated sign that transfigures the Shape itself leaving its interpretation to imagination.

In 2014 Ettore Racca gave his artistic activity a radical change. In constant desire to provide answers to his creativity, resulting in the continuous research of his goal, he deeply changed the way of realizing of his works. He moved his expressionistic painting style from traditional supports to a more contemporary material. He began painting on "polycarbonate" sheet whose shape, when enlarged, recalts the image of a film, and whose weight makes it float free in the air if suitably hooked to a support.

This innovative technique allows him to fully express his pictorial dynamism which is combined with perception of movement typical of cinematic souvenirs, by giving emotion and creating suggestions on the homogeneously colored support.

Ettore Racca paints his own pictorial"frame" encapsulated within the material, in order to evoke the image of a "cinematic suggestion" which comes alive at the slightest breath of air, reflecting shapes and colors of the environment and allowing observer look at the painting from two different mirror-inverted perspectives.

Works Dimensions:

• 200 * 36 em, weight 1.200 g;
• 170 * 36 em, weight 850 g;
• 150 * 36 em, weight 650 g.

This style change has arisen in April 2014 in Caselle Torinese Arena, where Ettore Racca showed with noticeable success his first works "Frames on big-sized, multicolored films".

Currently, his painting has reached a significant stylistic and emotional haven.

Sandro Martini

... my memories carry me away, thanks to Ettore's provocation and to his movie pictures. So I think ofthe great paintings by Fabio Mauri, as big as wide screens; the words "The End" go through them in violent gestures, essential up to the elegance of Kl~ne. An d so I think of a rash, unbearable flash, then black, and "lights up" and "outdoor cinema", the cinema where you could smoke in, then to cut off films and clips put together with some cello tape.
l've known Ettore for 30 or 40 years. Time doesn't really matter, actually. Now as then, Ettore calmly opens those carefully prepared parcels and he tries to tell me what 1'11 see, while colors burst an d combine, creating a kind of mutuai dialogue among them and the space around.
So I saw them before anyone else ... thinking of old rolls surprises me. I feel nostalgie, as my cl o se past was really far away in time. And I think about the speed of technology and about its overwhelming, unstoppable power. Of course, times are changing and this is understandable, but I like keeping some sweet, cinematic memories. Ettore looks naively surprised, astonished by the beauty it contains.

After a few years Ettore shyly shew me his paintings ... and I didn't even know he was a painter.
Those canvases were filled with colors and signs, colorful signs on a support which is now on giantsized film, covered with primary colors. A disobeying paint now abandons the solidarity with canvas and frames, it breaks free, invading a space which can't contain it, creating a new and ancient dialogue with architecture. As stroboscopic light it crashes from floor to the walls up to the ceiling, where it can escape from plain routine.

Angelo Mistrangelo

FLASHBACK
The tension of the signs in the painting of Ettore Racca reveals a particular desire to overcome the routine, the repetitive image and the ideai or materia! acceptance with other currents, schools or languages.
It is, therefore, a kind of painting that has always maintained a certain compositional accuracy. Apparently it seems to be in front of an informai resolution because, instead, it makes you discover a specific sequence of lines. A well-structured path which reveals a clear technique, a willingness to give consistency to the pictorial side and this begins with the Impressionists to land to the current season through the various instances offigurative art ofthe twentieth century.
... The result of a painting style built through subsequent transitions of color, almost a superposition of lines - color appearing vi tal, vibrant and supported by strenuous gestures.

... A nice solution thanks to the impact of the color in atmospheric brightness that lights up this uni v erse of uncontested, rapi d, robust signs generated by a speeding up in painting action.
The whole is, therefore, expression of a strict technique deriving from Japanese watercolor painting as seen through Zen spirituality. Speed, mystery, magie of the sign that dictates inner revelations.

Albino Galvano

The sensitivity of Ettore Racca is a happy combination of structures of signs and expressiveness of color. Racca is both a sign and color painter. But on his papers, or canvas, the two terms do not appear to contradict them: they are unified through the lyrical vehemence with which that sort of rain of signs is at the core ofhis work and it is always a statement of extreme figurative vitality.
Color and sign in Racca are identified in a mark on the paper or canvas, announced by an exuberant expressive vitality.
Racca is consistent, "clean" both in sign and in colors. A rare talent, today.

Antonio Carena

With a congenial detachment from "similisms" the painter Ettore Racca does not separate from the world, but he separates in the world being completely else. Vocationally aimed towards the "positive" ... using umpteenth memorial natural reasons suddenly misrepresented in living for quick energy paths according to contemporary dynamics of processing times.

Domenico Musci

REFRACTIONS
The motivation of the painting of Ettore Racca is of an intellectual nature. The creative urge is not dictated from the imitati o n of the beautiful object but its analysis, its decomposition and recomposition with the suggestion from a light track. A complicate and intriguing fabric that breaks down, enhances, highlights the essence and structure of things, a molecular examination involving the artist's sensitiveness.
The "stilllife" assumes the role ofthe continuation oflife, of its perennial changeability and constant transformation. The use of does build the object but it alters its nature with a refraction that wraps things and gives them a new look.
Racca stubbornly wants to penetrate inside the shapes with an indiscreet desire to investigate the nature and to separate it.

An operation which denotes spiritual aspiration to know the essence of the things that is not limited to the surface, an inner trip into the fragility and instability of life.