Nello Vegezzi - painter, sculptor and poet

The poet, painter and sculptor Nello Vegezzi was born in Piacenza in 1929 in an upper middle class family. For many years he lived at Turro near Podenzano, where he died after being run over by a car on 6 June 1993.


PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST
(translated from the site www.nellovegezzi.net)

The figure of Nello Vegezzi was an original presence, problematic and stimulating, on the Piacenza scene during the second half of the 20th century, a period of enormous changes.
He represented a critical experience towards the surviving patriarchal world, the sleepy provincialism, the refusal of everything new and different. His free and enthusiastic spirit brought him to a radical break with the dominant Catholic bourgeois conventions, and a militant poverty, involvement in the civil struggle for social and democratic emancipation, and participation in the community life of the Piacenza artists, inspired by the two masters Mosconi and Foppiani, leading to activities that linked research, exhibitions and debates on art with friendly playful conviviality.
In this fertile environment Nello developed his original search for artistic creativity which, while contesting the traditional canons, techniques and materials, the values of the dominant society, allowed him to develop new pathways, led by post-Avantgarde needs, in synthesis with arte povera and art brut. From this emerged the extraordinary series of his accatto-plastiche, fruit of assemblies of waste materials with hardly any modification or retouching, where he infused a magic expressivity and grace.
At the same time, Nello developed his poetic research along two fundamental registers: a civil, social, political discourse of inflamed exaltation and demands for liberty and democracy, and another of intense vibrant passionate liricism, inspired by crucial themes such as liberty, love and nature.