Prof. C. Immo Schneider

Central Washington University

Works of art are of two different kinds: those created primarily for connoisseurs and critics, and those which transcend the limits of a particular genre addressing themselves to all individuals endowed with a sense for art. "De la musique avant toute chose", and "ut pictura poesis".

The paintings of Pietro Finazzi fall under the second category. They include all sorts of landscapes from the North and South, water and clouds, trees everywhere, sunflowers of the Provence, wild animals. There is also Stonehenge, seen almost from the same angle as William Turner did two hundred years before, yet as stone sculptures with a human face. Expressive drawings of nudes together with compositions of an intriguingly colorful and abstract quality - : every single one of Finazzi's creations reaches beyond its picturesqueness, speaks also as a poem or sounds like a symphony of contrapuntal shapes and colors all together in a joyful, allencompassing harmony of being.

I myself appreciate especially the trees which represent a leitmotif among Finazzi's works. He seems to love them all: lonely trees as well as those growing close together like friends or brothers and sisters. Some of the tree-tops are shrouded in fog; the green, yellow or red foliage of others reflects brilliantly the intense light of a high noon or evening sun. The artist expresses every nuance by means of different techniques which allow him to paint a subject now in water colors, now in pastels, sometimes he prefers lithographs, monotips or drawings with India ink.

In the midst of an epoch like ours in which trees are dying everywhere because of environmental pollution and of being cut down in the last virgin forests, the artist reminds us of those long ago times when people venerated trees as divine beings sheltering the souls of their deceased...

Similar to the poet, Hermann Hesse, the painter Pietro Finazzi considers trees to be "the most impressive preachers". For (according to Hesse), "whoever has learned how to listen to trees, does not want to be anyone else but truly himself".

To discover the path into one's own universe and its inexhaustible meaning - can we expect more from a work of art?