This selection of Italian, Russian, and Serbian master engravers seeks to highlight, despite the diversity of their languages, the artist's strong lyrical involvement. As the Treccani dictionary explains, “Lyric”—in its modern sense—is “poetry in which the affective, sentimental, and emotional element and tone predominate, excluding historical, epic, realistic, didactic, or moralizing elements.” There seems to be a particular harmony between the engravers' painstaking labor—preparing the plates, inking, registering, and slowly drying the printed sheets—and the artists' desire to preserve the emotion of everyday life as a precious gift.
1. Italy, Alfredo Bartolomeoli; The great oak tree with its gnarled branches fills the landscape of the Urbino-born engraver, who has made woodcut his research horizon. An ancient tree, a companion in the studio garden, it has become for him a solid presence and a promise of the future, with which to await the buds of spring.
2. Italy, Susanna Doccioli; You fell in love with a shadow... the translated words of the Madrid poet Pedro Salinas (from Tú Vives Siempre En Tus Actos) transform the body of his beloved into a landscape, perhaps a transfigured archipelago, a remote refuge, almost a dream that appears beyond the grid of time.
3. Italy, Roberto Gianinetti; the time of memory in which objects appear reduced to clear profiles, where matter becomes transparency and content a fresh blue symbol. Beyond his own childhood, in the passing of civilizations, the artist focuses on the form of preservation, a gesture of security and welcome.
4. Italy, Mario Lo Coco; The paper, made with cotton tufts, captures the traces of symbolic geometries, of minimal tiles glazed in the heat of the oven. Action and memory leave in the artist's body—sublimated in the white space—the memory of the world, recomposed in an introverted and reflective balance.
5. Italy, Paolo Seghizzi; travel impressions among isolated bell towers and rolling river plains, traversed in FIAT 500s on a vintage car tour. The cadence of symbols ignites the composition, evoking the succession of stops: speed and architectural profiles for a visual narrative that unites the rice fields and the lagoon.
6. Serbia, Daniela Dimitrijevic; everyday life can transform into an abstract composition if the artist prioritizes the time of observation and seeks to convey the movement of matter, the internal physics that shapes bodies. It is a lyricism of detail, captured with the precise and delicate timing of femininity.
7. Serbia, Jovana Ðordevic; the story is the trace of an experience, abandoning the world of ideas and meanings to become dance, crystallizing the effects of gesture, sudden decisions, and sudden turns. The engraving thus becomes a journey that unites—in the same movements—the observer and the artist.
8. Serbia, Slobodan Radojkovic; a flat background that could take on infinite colors is a sky without temporal coordinates. Before this, suspended in a luminous lightness, rain clouds swollen with weight free themselves: the poetry of a moment suddenly reveals the emptiness of the human world.
9. Serbia, Irena Randejel; in an undefined space between the lights of the hall and the darkness of the dance floor, a musician animates the scene and draws a woman into the euphoria of dance. Their gazes do not meet, nor does the artist participate in the encounter: they are three bodies dreaming of a tomorrow, each guardian of its own melancholy.
10. Russia, Irina Antonova; a repeated symbol, the sacredness of a cross, envelops and preserves the flow of time. Flashes of memory flow within, a rose window on a sunny day, a monastery high on the horizon; then a thin hatching that perhaps alludes to rain, perhaps to the church as a sum of souls.
11. Russia, Aleksander Artamonov; houses like dens pierced by windows, people crowded together protected by a transparent shell: the artist's eye knows how to penetrate the cracks, finding the humanity of those hiding within. To engrave while preserving memory, seeking to erase the pain of his silent subjects.
12. Russia, Vera Karaseva; A fine hatching, a speckling that thickens in the buildings, breaks free in the vastness of the sky, aligns itself in the power of nature, marking the rhythm of the flowing water and the rustling of the meadows. History and the sacred, untamed and tamed nature, powerful and humble, are facets of a single land.
13. Russia, Sergei Repnin; the roofs of the houses set the stage for the dialogue between woman and heart. She is dressed in evening dress, he is the protagonist in scarlet red, guardian of a thousand loves. A few essential lines are enough to convey an emotion that belongs to everyone, from villages to metropolises, without distinction, without borders.
14. Russia, Igor Ulangin; man and clouds are made of the stuff of dreams. In a symbolic landscape, free in its use of proportions, everything is striped: the ticking of time, the mechanical noises of ships, the parallel furrows of plowed fields, and the geometries of small villages. The protagonists, however, are free and white.
Massimiliano Reggiani
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
1 Italy, Alfredo Bartolomeoli
A teacher of printmaking techniques at international courses and professor of woodcut, he has printed for the greatest contemporary masters. In his works, he focuses on the soft contours of his native Urbino, using the shapes of his matrices to suggest an architectural framework of arches and pilasters, a lasting echo of the Marche Renaissance.
2 Italy, Susanna Doccioli
A teacher of woodcut and printmaking techniques, she initially trained in Urbino at the International Center for Graphic Art (K.A.U.S.). An artist with an elegant style, she allows realism to shine through through a rhythmic and orderly network of composed geometry. She thus combines the charm and freedom of the abstract with a powerful figurative language.
3 Italy, Roberto Gianinetti
A teacher of printmaking at international courses, schools, and academies, he has a solid scientific background that is reflected in his ongoing artistic research and experimentation. The blank sheet of paper is a silent space within which the entire world sediments, through print, its voices—verbal, visual, and material—in an infinite dialogue of shapes and colors.
4 Italy, Mario Lo Coco
A ceramic sculptor and author of several artist's books, he presents a reflection on the traced sign, revealing—on the surfaces of geometric solids—all its expressive potential. In his works on paper, however, he reduces space to a potential matrix upon which chromatic sediments and a free flow of asemic writing flow.
5 Italy, Paolo Seghizzi
He studied engraving with Roberto Gianinetti at the Vercelli Academy, absorbing his polyphonic language and luminous composition. He constructs visually stable forms with clear meaning, masterfully combining individual narrative elements like tiles in a contemporary mosaic of symbols, memories, and words.
6 Serbia, Daniela Dimitrijevic
The tension of a gesture becomes the protagonist of the sign, the underlying force that generates its form. The engraving becomes the trace of a dance, the stage for a performance now faded but at the same time alive and persistent. Art doesn't necessarily serve to narrate because it can also transform itself into a sudden flash of knowledge.
7 Serbia, Jovana Ðordevic
Art printmaking can become a reflection on matter, on the physical universe that responds to its own rules of chemistry, molecular tensions, and movements beyond our rational control. The relationship between the artist and the matrix becomes a tale of a renewed coexistence between man and nature, narrated through the silent passage of time.
8 Serbia, Slobodan Radojkovic
The naturalness of the curved line, the rigor of the photographic image: the artist embraces our positivist past, which firmly believed in limitless growth. The environment, once a simple place of living, delicately resurfaces despite its wounds. It is a heartfelt plea to push reflection toward a balance never truly sought.
9 Serbia, Irena Randejel
The forms of Secession and Expressionism continue to evolve in contemporary language to convey grace and elegance, or unease and frenzy. Engraving allows the artist to refine his style, which is no longer a description or an instrument of investigation but a nervous word, a line that gives substance to the indistinct world of shadows and colors.
10 Russia, Irina Antonova
Attentive to the spiritual value that permeates reality, the artist uses printmaking to highlight the multiplicity of levels that coexist in every moment of everyday life. Metaphysical presences, symbols that transform into planes of color, memory and hope, intertwining lines that evoke people and animals, balanced between physicality and transcendence.
11 Russia, Aleksander Artamonov
An undisputed master, he heads the "Graphcom" graphic design committee, heir to the centuries-old Kazan school of engraving. An artist capable of rendering the volumes of bodies and architecture with just a few strokes, and of evoking symbolic atmospheres by blending memory and spirituality. He has looked with great interest at twentieth-century Italian metaphysical painting.
12 Russia, Vera Karaseva
Continuing the traditional form that in Kazan narrated the region through its jewels of sacred art, the artist maintains the canonical technique while looking to the present. Thus, she creates a unique gaze under which architecture and urban planning protect generations while empires and nations, states and ideologies pass by.
13 Russia, Sergei Repnin
Color predominates in her works, but it does not describe: it creates. Each printing phase superimposes contours on the preceding emotion, and the outlines of simple objects, whether bottles or goblets or a series of apartment building windows, construct a new narrative plane. Even the use of black bears witness to an oil-rich past that stains and permeates the present.
14 Russia, Igor Ulangin
He favors flat colors that allow him to enhance the graphic line by working with juxtaposed layers of color. This artist celebrates the roots of fine art printmaking, when the expressive power of technique was paramount. The rhythmic pulses of the carving geometrically mark time and expand the narrative space.
Notes by Massimiliano Reggiani
