Biography
Jonathan Guaitamacchi was born in London in 1961.
Graduated from the Brera Academy in Milan, he lives between Milan, London, and Cape Town; during his formative years, he collaborated as a draftsman and artistic consultant for several Milanese architecture and design studios. He devoted himself to painting in the early '90s, creating black and white urban landscapes of great impact and suggestion. In 1997, after a period of work spent inside the disused facilities at Bovisa in Milan, in the gasometer area, the AEM (Municipal Energy Company of Gas), he held his first solo exhibition inside the Officine della Pressione, precisely at Bovisa. In the same year, he won the "Premio Suzzara," ex aequo, edition 1997/98.
Guaitamacchi works on space, delving into the third dimension, depth, and interprets architecture as a language, as an obsession, as a repetition of a way. His paintings, true architectural projects, tell his vision. In an era where landscapes and urban views are beloved subjects taken up by various contemporary artists, Guaitamacchi stands out. Among the first in contemporary times to confront the urban context, "on the canvas he does not represent the total or merely architectural expression of reality, he releases its essence, the active principle, he does not tell the place, but its reflection, its metaphor through his unique and unmistakable style." An atmosphere of the day-after, murky and overwhelming, a post-industrial and peripheral world that plunges into the mists, running across vast expanses, sliding along the bends of a river. And if invention and rhetoric do not always find the right balance, the technique still imposes itself aggressively, played out on rapid bird's-eye views, continually broken by sharp rhythms and capable of veering with a wingbeat towards vanishing points projected ever further away. Perspectives that work as well in large-scale works as in smaller ones, suggesting a "latent" communication, as if the paintings were filigreeing the impressions of a static traveler, whose cinematic gaze frames a sequence of frames from the frame of a window.
He began to exhibit in Italy and abroad, especially in South Africa, the landscape often taken as the subject of his typical bird's-eye views (series "Target"), which characterize its unmistakable perspective and make it visible to the general public. He has numerous exhibitions to his credit in Europe, China, South Africa, and America. Known for his expansive views of global cities, urban landscapes, and panoramic views between one place and another, Guaitamacchi paints landscapes whose dissoluteness comes directly from memory, from the artist's connection to the English territory and Anglo-Saxon culture from which he comes. The imposing cliffs of Dover or the M25 (the London orbital), thus become real gateways, places that continually stimulate the artist's imagination.
He recently held a major solo exhibition at the Giampiero Biasutti Gallery in Turin and at the Barbican Centre in London on the occasion of the Olympic Games; he will soon be engaged in new important exhibitions that will take him back to South Africa and China.
