Page 92 - Adrenaline DEC

HYPER REALISM Reflectiing on Italian automotive art
Artist Enrico Ghinato, like many of his countrymen and women has an obsession with the automobile, and more obviously Ferrari... A follower of a certain style of painting which lends itself perfectly to all things cars. Today he is well known for his automotive interpretations onto canvas.
As a boy in his native Milan he was often found in his father Vito’s garage amongst the motor oil and grease, Enrico has personal memories being born and nurtured in this automotive atmosphere and his aspiration to better himself and not to be taken for granted. Focused on refining a sophisticated pictorial style on canvas revealing an incredible talent by borrowing from American and English Hyper-realism and Photo-realism movements of the mid-sixties. Ghinato’s studies have a story, a profound tradition rooted in contemporary art, and it is from this that his critical credibility is derived.
The cars he reproduces on canvas mainly represent the more sought after and elusive of marques. The detail in Ghinato’s canvases are very strong points of expression, an impulse towards infinity that goes beyond what is visible to most, opening towards a world consisting of imagination and aesthetic achievements. It is through these details - headlights, shining steel and chrome, the strong primary colours of bonnets and wings blazing with a liquid light, that the observer can escape from reality at the artists request, in favour of a Flemish- type imagination within the realism of the canvas. If you look at any of the paintings, a second image is hidden in the reflections mirrored in the cars bodies as if a painting within a painting. This concept of mirror images which delighted many Flemish painters, Ghinato has used to his advantage by replacing the mirror with the reflective nature of the surfaces of his subjects.
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