Mario Raciti: Italian painting, ethereal and subtle. A journey into the intimacy of the soul through refined signs exploring the unknown and the profound.
Among the most sensitive and refined interpreters of Italian painting, Mario Raciti has ventured to the edge of the knowable, into that elsewhere where only great artists have had the courage to go. Born in Milan on April 19, 1934, he began painting at a very young age, alongside a deep interest in poetry and the study of music. He participated in the San Fedele Prize in Milan in 1963 and 1964, the year of his first solo exhibition at Galleria Il Canale in Venice. It was during this occasion that he formed early and valuable connections with Marchiori, who would follow his work from then on, and with Valsecchi, who was generous with encouragement.
The allusive power pf the mark conveys extreme messages and profound truths
From the series Presenze-Assenze to Mitologie, and later Misteri, Raciti’s painting became increasingly evanescent, thinned out and delicate, as if to document the intimacy of his own soul. In its allusive strength, his mark becomes expressive, conveying extreme messages and profound truths; it becomes a graphic interpreter of a subtle, measured language, small, yet expansive and exquisitely refined. It is a painting of another time: the time of the eternal, the inward. It is not the informal painting of “letting it out”, of energetic and unrestrained action; it is faint, light, “white”, evanescent because it looks toward the unknown rather than the already known. Mario Raciti remains a well-known yet somewhat borderline painter - as he himself notes in an autobiographical passage included in the catalogue raisonné published by Skira in 2023 - saying he “cannot emerge any more than he already has within the official lines of this society, a society so enamored with spectacle and showcases, one that does not care to look inward, perhaps out of fear of finding nothing there.”
A pivotal moment the encounter with the Lucchetta Brothers of the Euromobil Group, whom he sees as the four horsemen of a benevolent apocalypse, bold musketeers of beauty
And speaking of this catalogue, edited by Sandro Parmiggiani and supported by the Euromobil Group, a fundamental milestone in his work which time has finally granted the recognition and presence it deserves (from the Rome Quadriennale in 1973 and 1986 to the Venice Biennale in 1978 and 1986, and the solo exhibition at Mart in Rovereto in 2016, among many others), we must not forget the commitment made by the Lucchetta brothers in consolidating the value of a discovery. “The first time I met them,” Raciti recalls, “was at my long- ago exhibition at Palazzo Sarcinelli in Conegliano. I was charmed by the way they were always together, the four of them, like horsemen of a benevolent Apocalypse, smiling, positive, wanting to live with art, happy to connect with artists.
Numerous the accolades during his career, from the Rome Quadriennale to the Venice Biennale
And so their company shone with the beauty of art fused with product. And so they moved ever more boldly, bridging the gap from museum to the contemporary, from scenic views to a deeper culture. They search and take risks to the very end, those four Lucchettas, in a world going in the opposite direction, boldly, like musketeers of beauty.”
His time is that of the eternal, of the inner world, because he looks toward the unknown, not the already known
