AMEDEO BOLDRINI
b. 1948 Acquafredda, Italy
d. 2002 Acquafredda, Italy
BIOGRAPHY | EXHIBITIONS | PUBLICATIONS | VIDEOS
SELECTED WORKS
BIOGRAPHY
Amedeo Boldrini was a textile worker in a hosiery factory. As a self-taught artist, he began to produce abstract paintings of intense colors at a young age. At that time he developed a great joy in experimenting with different mixed media techniques to achieve eruptive effects. However, these works were not interesting or unusual.
Everything changed in 1988 when Boldrini experienced a series of spontaneous visionary states. In them he met a tall man that seem to him to be a bearded monk with long hair clad in white robes. When Boldrini awoke from these trance states, sheets of paper were lying in front of him, filled to the brim with uncanny drawings of peculiar figures and mysterious symbols and characters. It took a while before Boldrini realized that it was he who had drawn the tangle of lines and dots. Since then, almost every night he dreamed of the monk standing in front of a large palace on an imposing staircase and pointing to a fountain in the middle of the square.
Over time, the monk revealed himself as the last initiate in the secret science of an unknown civilization. By virtue of his mastery of spiritual powers, he had succeeded in penetrating Amedeo Boldrini's consciousness, guiding him to create a completely new kind of art. Boldrini was chosen to become a receiver and interpreter of the history and deeds of a people who lived before time immemorial.
As a result, Boldrini repeatedly fell into trance, in which he spoke in unknown languages, while his hand drew hieratic figures, motionless as statues, temples, pyramids and towers, covered over and over with ornaments, signs, pictograms and symbols in a confusing variety of lines and patterns. He later transferred these drawings with markers to stones and treated them with acids as to produce acid etchings on river stones and marble. Boldrini claimed had developed this process in trance by instruction of his supernatural guides.
The reliefs thus created on river stones, marble slabs and very rarely on copper plates are of precise composition, like petroglyphs of an ancient civilization, without depth and perspective, but of disturbing beauty and suggestive attraction. Despite the bewildering variety of lines and patterns that hypnotically captivate the eye, his works exude a mysterious calm and serenity.
EXHIBITIONS
1990 Biblioteca Civica Girolamo Muziano, Acquafredda, Italy
PUBLICATIONS
Giovetti, Paola, Amedeo Boldrini, scultore medianico. Luce e Ombra, 122, 2022, pp. 49-54.
Giovetti, Paola, La creatività artistica dei medium. Luce e Ombra, 100, 2000, pp. 381-403.
Richiusa, Maria, Amedeo Boldrini. Gazzetta di Mantova, 6 April 1989.
VIDEOS
External link to an amateurish but lengthy video of Amedeo Boldrini from 1996 producing an automatic drawing and thereby speaking in an unknown language (in Italian)
The Mediumistic Art of Amedeo Boldrini. External link to a video by Elena Vacchelli, 1999 (in Italian)
