Carlo Boanini was born in Impruneta, in the province of Florence, in 1962. Entrepreneur and IT consultant, he has made drawing and painting an integral part of his life since he was a child. His works, delicate abstract expressions of evocative creativity, are an intimate expression, in tune with his moods, so much so that they do not bear a title, but only the date, to pinpoint the moment in which they were born.

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Giving shape to our mental world visions is an innate need that humanity always has had and strived to satisfy, giving spontaneous birth with the most diverse techniques to what we now define each civilization’s cultural heritage.

Social identity is thus nourished by and built upon the works of the past, glimpsed in passing or examined attentively, and personal identity is increasingly structured by listening to one’s own autonomous inner world that keeps growing thanks also to external stimuli: a significant dialogue that moulds one’s self.

The first time, years ago, that I saw some drawings by Carlo Boanini, I had a distinct feeling that they were the expression of an integrated imagination, where line, color and composition incisively occupy the center of a space made of silence and order. Signs defined as project boundaries, performed with a linear, constant graphic gesture, evocative of uninterrupted sounds: the visual voice of a thought.

Partly figurative and partly abstract elements that follow one another like words in the chapters of a narrative work, whose reading gives rise to the desire to know the succession of events, the conclusion and the meaning of the narrative.

In general, it is the action of reading that generates unique and personal mental images in the reader. While visually immersing oneself in the author’s compositions, the user can experience the desire to translate them into mental words, or wanting to remember early words heard as children.

After experiencing that there is a compelling world, born from listening to the first story, or novel, and depending on the ability of the narrator, these new stimuli whet the desire of experimenting more and more… of those words taking shape.

So, when I received the gift of being able to see the entire production of Carlo Boanini’s drawings and graphics, I experienced the same desire to follow his images, one after another, and again… with the same enchantment.

A production begun in 1983, never interrupted, kept private by the author and shared with the public for the first time in this first exhibition titled Emotions. Boanini himself explains the motivation: “To me, drawing is something very intimate. Since I was a child I would draw on any scrap of paper. It’s a need I feel. It is not my job, but it is my way of expressing, an instinctive mechanism, often linked to the experience of the moment; there is no preparation, the color and lines go straight onto the paper.”

These words therefore introduce a world of image expressions, which after the first year, in which the graphic executions were without use of color, have then been continuously materialized with colorful linearisms in search of a compositional balance without a sketch planning, but directly traced from an initial point and its subsequent, extemporaneous “flowering”. The author uses pencils, technical drawing pens, ink pens and at the same time brushes for the use of watercolours, gouache, ink and colored inks, selecting fine coarse-grained, high weight papers. The time Carlo Boanini devoted to drawing was almost always during the night, at the end of the working day, when everything slows to a stop and the hand begins to “speak in lines and colours” in a spontaneous way. A phenomenon that recalls the ease and inevitability with which the mind begins to wander into dreams; it is no coincidence that the author’s images, though crafted with open eyes, nonetheless evoke dreamlike images.

Giovanni Tenucci

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In 2023 he presents a collection of six works at the Florence International Crafts Exhibition
both in their physical forms and as digital NFTs registered on the Ethereum blockchain.