Renato Barilli Returns to Painting After 50 Years as Critic

Renato Barilli, one of Italy's most authoritative art critics, has returned to painting after nearly fifty years devoted to criticism and theory. Now in his eighties, Barilli explains that the frequent deaths of his peers prompted him to resume painting, feeling he could not leave this chapter unfinished. He rejects the notion of a necessary dissociation between critic and artist, comparing it to the spectrum between male and female or magnetic poles. Barilli uses smartphone photographs as the basis for his portraits, embracing photography's pervasive influence while aiming to restore substance, volume, and sensuality to the images. He aligns his figurative approach with artists like David Hockney and Alex Katz, but does not renounce his earlier defense of abstraction and conceptual art, asserting that today art offers numerous viable paths. The interview, conducted by Valentina Tanni, was published on Artribune.