About

Reto Visini, descending from Italian immigrants, is an artist and architect based in Derendingen, Switzerland. He studied architecture at the ETH Zurich and runs his own studio since over thirty years. His main field of activity in architecture is social housing in an appropriate good standard and value for the less fortunate people. Repetition of the (prefabricated) element and serial productions are fields of interests as well in his artistic as in his architectural work. As Luigi Snozzi, one of the most important Swiss architects, said: "To avoid boredom, repeat your element."

From a young age drawing and painting was Reto’s passion. He had no professional art training, but taught himself everything necessary for it. In his life over the last four decades he created a few hundred works, most of them stored in different stocks and unshared with the public to the present day. He feels familiar with the great Henri Rousseau (Le Douanier Rousseau), the French customs officer, who in old age transformed himself completely into a painter.

In the early nineties Visini had three exhibitions in different Zurich galleries, presenting Series of Female Figures or abstractions of them, ink painted in postcard-scale (DIN A6). Several series were printed on high quality silk by the Swiss luxury brand Fabric Frontline.

The fabrics were processed in the international haute couture. Already these works are about the unbelievable diversity of life in all its countless forms.

The most important artist’s early works before that time are a series of paintings on paste board, named Utopias 86/89, which deal with love as an (un)fulfillable dream.

The first decade in the new millennium was marked by a severe creative crisis. The works of that period (all located somewhere between figuration and abstraction, undefined and undecided) didn’t satisfy the artist at all. He felt compelled to destroy all of them. This was the time, when Visini decided from that point on to work strictly for himself and to avoid any public presentation. He has refrained until now.

Around 2010 Reto began to deal with compositions of rectangular figures, so called Exercises in Tectonics. These works are monochrome computer assisted drawings and created in series of 12 works, that can be scaled as desired. Of course, they have much to do with architecture, construction, put and place, and the relationship between figure and space.

Then he turned to the traditional painting ground, the canvas. Around 2015 to 2019 he created a series of over seventy works, very precisely painted geometrical compositions, dealing about eternity. In the tradition of concrete art (Konkrete Kunst) he named this series About Eternity: Neokonkret.

These works explore the representability of infinity as a mental dimension, or in terms of time, eternity in the sense of endless life. The compound between the precisely painted partial areas of the overall shape (as part of the real world) and the metaphysical reference of eternity should become as one in the eye of the beholder.

Recently, since 2020, Reto Visini persues an archetypical theme. About three hundred Paintings until now figure out the same basic composition of a riverside with a forest or a group of trees beside it. Across the River into the Trees. These minimal landscapes are the quintessence of landscape as such. Water in form of a river (or a pond or a lake) and trees as most impressive parts of the flora. They are the foundation and source of all life. When rivers disappear and forests die, earthly life will be over.

Crossing the river (Acheron) is already part of Greek mythology, but appears also in many other cultures until the modern times as a symbol for the transition of life. Across the river and into the trees is the metaphor for dying in Hemingway’s famous novel. From this point of view, these paintings interpret possible last impressions of life before passing away. From the beginning to the end are the foundation and the source of life present in the keyframes of our life.

For about ten years there is another subject, that draws the artist’s attention. Sketches of madonnas emerge in loose succession. Les Saintes-Maries du Mont Blanc. This work in progress, a series of finger exercises, serves as a preparation for one of the next cycle of works in a larger scale in the coming years.