The artist Giampaolo Russo

On Friday the 29th of March I attended the closing of the exhibition "The Enigma of the Face" by Pelagia Kyriazi, Zacharias Papantoniou and Giampaolo Russo, which took place at Kourd Gallery.

Being there I had the pleasure and the honour to meet the painter Giampaolo Russo and to learn about his work and life. Highly honest, humble and realistic, he portrays art in a way that makes it feel so accessible. He manages with great ease to make the uniqueness of his work and his vision noticeable. He is the epitome of "an artist is born not made", although his constant work and evolution is undeniable; his soul, his driving force is deeply artistic. He finds the distinctiveness in people, landscapes and situations and transforms it into beauty, making his portraits, his story, and even Athens, seem magical.

Our mutual need to talk about what connects us - Art - led us to today's conversation and interview.

How would you describe your career in a few words?

I started like all of us: drawing as a child.

I would describe my life, or career if you prefer, as very non-linear. Actually, I think an artist can't really separate life from career.

I was born in Zurich, because my mother emigrated at the beginning of the 70s from southern Italy to find work and a better life in Switzerland. She had like many emigrants "guest worker status", a very discriminating Swiss invention: you couldn't bring your family with you the first four years you were a "guest worker" in Switzerland.

Two months after my birth, I was back in southern Italy and grew up in my village, Castrignano dei Greci in the Grecia Salentina region, with my grandparents who spoke an old dialect of Greek with each other. It was like a secret language that they spoke in the neighborhood with people of their generation. During my early life in Italy, until about  15, I kept drawing a lot and copying paintings from the few art books my grandparents and my uncle and aunt had at home.

Photo from the personal archive of Giampaolo Russo

I copied a lot from Japanese xylographists, Hokusai, Hiroshige and Utamaro in connection with Japanese cartoons I saw on TV. These kinds of drawings and the radical summary of the human figure in Japanese art still attracts my attention, because it's also the direction in my art to find the essential lines to compose subjects on a canvas. Japanese prints are very complex in their composition and they have something light in execution and result in how lines have been set.

Could you summarize yourself as an artist through a work of art (painting, song etc.)?

It depends on the period and time I find myself in and what I am  experiencing.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about a melody of "Subterraneans",  a composition by David Bowie and Brian Eno. This composition says a lot about going inside a space, but  at the same time about being apart from everything, an outsider.

Was there a time in your life that you realized that you’re made to be an artist?

No never. In fact I just followed something that was important to me and that I expressed like a classical artist would do: A lot of the time, I failed, and I also thought about giving up everything many times. But it happened that it became interesting and important to me to continue my struggle and I kept at it.

Based on the portraits with oil on canvas would you “accept” people seeing you as some kind of sculptor too?

I do my paintings with layers of oil colours. It's like letting them mature and grow through layers of colours, destroying them and recomposing them.

At first sight, the result of my works may look formally like a relief for many people, yes, but I never saw myself as a sculptor.

The photo was taken on March 29, 2024, at the Kourd Gallery

Have you been painting with models since the beginning of your career or you were painting only self portraits?

During my years in Milan, as I was studying at the Accademia di Brera, a focus of my professor was self portraits, the work of posing naked models.

That's how I began to focus on self portraits and on portraits.

In our conversation you told me about the “energy” of a model and that that’s what you’re looking for when you’re painting, not just the beauty. Have you ever seen someone and felt the need to paint them?

Normally someone who decides to sit for a portrait, knows my work and is interested in the long process it involves: I normally speak with the model during the sittings. In every sitting you can watch the model changing on the canvas through his/her different state through his or her expression but also through our conversations. Every sitting lasts from two to two and half hours. To complete a portrait it takes me more  than 50 sittings. I'm interested in getting close to the presence of the person I'm portraying; it's like an energy, a radiance that comes out of a painted person on the canvas. That needs a lot of willingness to handle the energy that comes from the model. I see the artist as a filter, you take the essential things that should be included on the canvas.

But yes, I've also asked people I don't know well and initially found it interesting to sit for a portrait, but they never showed up, or came only once.

Do you have to be romantic to see the possibilities in someone and use them as a muse?

I don't think so. I think more that you have to be "present" in those moments you are trying to work something out of the model.

I did a series of portraits of Victoria, who could be considered a "muse" of sorts. I found her a very fascinating woman and very enigmatic one, and this was what kept me working on her face.

Would you like to have only one muse for the rest of your career?

I hope that something very interesting comes out of the varyied work I do in creating a work of art: A very good and surprising work could be a very welcome result.

I think the important thing is to see new things, even if only with one model. Otherwise it makes no sense.

So what does “The Face as an Enigma” mean to you? Does the spectator have to look for the face in the paintings and what it’s symbolizing, just like the artist has to look for the energy of the model that he’s painting?

I have always been interested in looking at peoples' faces, and to discern a lot of states, also the emotional, hidden states of them. I think that working as I do is a way of finding a kind of freedom, liberation. For me and for them.

I'm not symbolizing other things:

The person achieves a kind of fullness in finding all these added conditions on a canvas. At the same time you have to watch my works longer to see this; this could be the enigmatic point.

The photo was taken on March 29, 2024, at the Kourd Gallery

We could say that all of your portraits were a little bit dark or sad. Is this what you were seeing in the models or is it your emotional projection?

I like to search after hidden sides in people and their faces. It happens that they are more dark, or sad, because people naturally become very tired when sitting, and I do too. But also because humans always hide parts we don't really get to see in our every day lives.

I know of very few very good works of art in history that are not "reflective" or not melancholic. Art is a way to go into depth, and depth is mostly not a comfortable place.

Photo from the personal archive of Giampaolo Russo

How was your experience of the exhibition in an Athenian Gallery and the collaboration with Greek artists?

I like Athens a lot. Collaboration is always a way to get to know new people and how they work and live or try to survive with art.

I had only one opportunity to speak to Pelagia and Zacharias. I think they are serious working artists, I liked the connection that the gallerist made between our works.

The gallery collaborators were  very warm and positive.

Photo from the personal archive of Giampaolo Russo

Could you find some similarities between Athens and Italian cities as cultural regions? Do you think that the established political ideology has something to do with it?

I like the energy of Athens, it's something hidden in the ground, behind the new constructions.

I think Athens has a lot of similarity to South Italy and to some Southern italian cities like Taranto, Bari or Naples. Athens itself reminds me a lot of the villages of the Grecia Salentina, where i come from: When I was in Athens i was thinking if you put these villages  together you have like the spirit of Athens: nice, wild, tumbledown, lively, ugly, beautiful, anarchic, narrow.

Greece and Italy both have a right leaning governments, Italy a far right one: You can see many results because of it: Culture is not very important for the government. I know some artists in Italy, who have emigrated, because they have better opportunities. That's one of the reasons I still live in Zurich.

Do you feel scared at all about the future of art in general? Do you agree with the blurry lines of what "is" art and what "isn’t"? How open are you in experimenting with new ideas or different styles?

The Art World can be very distracting, so I tend to concentrate on my own work and I don't go normally to openings I'm not interested in like a lot of artists do to see and be seen.

Like most artists, I have always worked part-time to survive alongside my art, as a postman, in a library, and in the last several years as an art teacher in a secondary school: I think it's good and more secure to go that way so you don't have to compromise  your art. I think new ideas and styles come with doing, I'm not the artist who suddenly decides to go new ways because the market wants this.

It's important to take the time it takes to complete something and in the meantime you work on developing a new idea in your head for a future work.

Photo from the personal archive of Giampaolo Russo

So let's make Switzerland, or even Milan, our next stop in order to enjoy many more conversations and art with our beloved Giampaolo. Until then keep in touch with him and follow his work https://www.giampaolorusso.com/en/.

And if you want to enrich your playlist, here's the link to the song he shared with us https://open.spotify.com/track/2yfKkvgywRAY9xy849piLp?si=c99faf8636e148d9.

Giampaolo Russo's current group exhibition "Salon der Gegenwart" in Switzerland, from August 31 to November 10, 2024