Riccardo Camoni
The Imprint. Riccardo Camoni, 1979 – 1983

“An artist is a pelican or nothing”

– RC

I was struck by his dogged loyalty to just a few colours. Especially red, a vivid protagonist, which sometimes interacted with black against the light background of the paper. It was the early 1980s, and I saw that his painted, monochrome forms hankered for the three dimensions: a projecting, architectural presence projected into space. Riccardo Camoni crossed paths with me and Martina Simeti, who was still a child at the time, for her father Turi’s studio overlooked the same courtyard as Riccardo’s studio at number 27 Viale Bligny. Martina’s mother, Carla Ortelli, had also opened a gallery under her own name at the same address, one still fondly remembered by experts for its pioneering and, in many cases, ahead-of-its-time activities. This shared memory gave rise to the idea for this small posthumous solo exhibition, which I decided to call L’Impronta (‘The Imprint’). It is a title that came to me almost naturally, because lasting leaving traces in the imagination was the dream and goal of those generations of the 1960s and 1970s. The visible world was then clearly in turmoil, in evolution, and in his work, Riccardo Camoni possessed and projected that epochal, widespread and determined desire to seek and transform. [Excerpt from the text by Mariuccia Casadio]