User:Valentina Coccarelli/Gian Carlo Riccardi

Gian Carlo Riccardi (Frosinone, 21 October 1933 - Frosinone, 7 February 2015) was an Italian artist, painter, theatre director, sculptor and writer.

Biography
Gian Carlo Riccardi was born on 21 October 1933. In 1961 Gian Carlo Riccardi graduated with honours in set design from the Academy of Fine Arts of Rome on Via Ripetta. After a few years, he obtained a diploma in Theatre and Film Direction at the Experimental Centre in Rome. He has been described by the art critic Enrico Crispolti as a "multimedia artist" and has worked with writers and artists such as Achille Bonito Oliva, Alberto Moravia , Cesare Zavattini. Writers and journalists such as Angelo Maria Ripellino e André Pieyre de Mandiargues. Between the 1960s and 1970s he worked as a set designer and director at RAI. He is also editor of satirical magazines such as Il Travaso delle Idee, Marc'Aurelio, Simplicissimus and Il Borghese. He was part of the Roman Theatre Avant-garde, collaborating with Pino Pascali, Carmelo Bene, Memè Perlini and others.

These experiences led him to open the Gruppo Teatro Laboratorio Arti Visive in Frosinone in 1961 and later, in 1962, the Teatro Club, where he staged artistic performances and plays with various actors.

The director's plays and performances focus on gestures and the need to express the condition of contemporary man, imprisoned in the daily routine and contradictions of life. The theatrical events are directed towards a recovery of public space as a place of active dialogue with the spectator, who actively collaborates in the construction of the staging.

In 1997, he founded the Teatro dell'Immagine. Gian Carlo Riccardi's theatre became a concert theatre. Riccardi's pictorial production deals with various themes such as the grotesque, the double, irony, but also the world of childhood, through drawing , caricature and abstract painting. His works have been exhibited at solo and group exhibitions in Italy and abroad, such as the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome (1968), the ArtExpo Review in Geneva (1984), the British Art Fair in the City of London (1985), the Centre International D’art Contemporain in Paris (1988) and the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona (1999).

In his sculptures, Riccardi uses poor materials such as plexiglas, paper, wood and iron.

The Rooms, realised since the 1980s , are installations always made with simple and salvaged elements (mainly wood and iron). These are examples of site-specific works capable of building a dialogue with the surrounding space and the observer. They are realised using walls coloured according to abstract patterns, fragments of wood and everyday objects.

Riccardi exhibited his installations at the European Parliament in 1991, at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993, and at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto in 1995.

He writes theatre scripts, prose and poetic texts. In the latter, various themes emerge (already addressed in painting, theatre and sculpture) concerning the surreal, the improbable, memory and childhood.

He disappears on 7 February 2015 in his home town.