Renato Lipari was born in Milan in 1952. His artistic career starts with the experimentation of different styles and techniques, that confirm his innate creativity and natural need for research. In the early 2000s, after he left the previous production, his language moves towards a rigorous survey of the surface using the shredded euro, at first defining a conceptuality of complaint, then moving towards an “analytical” side. He exhibited in solo and group exhibitions and in the most qualified contemporary art fairs. Of himthey wrote among others: Carmen De Stasio, Mimmo Di Benedetto, Francesco Gallo, Marina Giordano, Giovanna Grossato, Gianfranco Labrosciano, Loredana Rea, Marcello Palminteri, Gabriele Perretta and Giuseppe Viviano.
He lives and works in Palermo, Italy.
Critical text taken from the presentation of Giuseppe Viviano from the Renato Lipari ContemporaneaMente catalog, April 2018:
“Pandering an inhrent inclination to observation, attention to detail, to research, the artist conducts, drawing on the crowded sphere of common things, original wide-ranging experimentations through the use and manipulationof different materials, raw or processed sometimes recovered and reinserted in the artistic context, resounding with clear echoes on the linguistic-expressive stylistic and formal plan glass , flakes of brass, sand wood, cotton and printed canvas, wire mesh, rusted iron wire and barbed wire, components of the first alphabeth, which go alongside and sometimes overlap to the proper pictorial intervention, drips and red blood stains, handprints, geometries at the border of monochrome backgrounds and sometimes written ironic slogan that speack of a socially engaged art. Lipari’s quest lands on the threshold of the second millennium, to a new aesthetics, aided by the fortuitous rediscovery of a common and at the same time precious material, fruit of labor and source of contrast, symbol of power and greed, which will mark a decisive turning point, in this artistic career, euro banknotes withdrawn from the market and reduced into thin filaments. The first works in which shredded euro appear are from , this period, yet with contaminations of elements functional to the representation of a conceptuality of denounce. The artist focuses then on an investigation between the matter (the new!) and the surface, and, put aside the brushes, acrilics and other elements, develops a new language which defines his style, this being based upon the exclusive use of paper shredding with a more accentuated tendency to conceptuality and abstraction. The surface of the canvas, now appears entiraly covered by shredded euro fragments on successive stratifications that are articulated in a thick and vibrating plot of symbols in which a close look can see tiny writings, traces of holograms and filigree. A monochromatic weaving from which more or less rigorous geometries, symbols, abstract backgrounds, essential shapes and rarely figurations, emerge from chromatic contrast. Thew result is a new conception of the working space, new timings and gestures. The creative act moves from an idea of the artist which prefigures the outcome and geverns its execution but has also a certain unpredict ability due to the specificity of the technique and the materials. “