Heart Shifts

Gottardo Ortelli (1938-2003) graduated from the Brera Academy, where he worked first as an assistant and then (1974) as a professor of painting. The early seventies mark the artist’s departure from post-informal poetics and pop suggestions. The canvases become monochrome layouts punctuated by diagonal lines fragmented and spaced evenly, interrupted by unexpected pauses that leave uncovered the color of the funds. At the beginning of the eighties Ortelli focuses on the expressive and mysterious power of color, which makes room for luminous polyphony in large paintings with vibrant timbres and sculptural experimentation. From the mid-1980s, he returned to "pure painting". The layered color, made of ignitions and pauses, ignites of reds and yellows, becomes heat, energy, pulsating matter of life, evocation, resonance, mood, as shown by the work "Heart Shifts" of 1991.