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9 hours ago
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“Renzo never cavorts blindly in his art,” wrote Feliks Topolski of his friend and fellow artist, my father Renzo Galeotti, who has died aged 85. On paper, on canvas, and occasionally in sculpture, he was a creator who never saw any reason to disconnect his art from his politics and his wider sense of the world.
This was most evident in his cycles of studies of the Italian communist thinker Antonio Gramsci and the author Primo Levi, but was as true of his other works, from commissioned portraits to landscapes of his home town of Carrara, Tuscany, that charted the way the insatiable demand for local marble was devouring the Apuan Alps, towering over the town.
Renzo was born in Carrara, the son of Tina (nee Cinotti), and Mario Galeotti, a barber, and went to the local Carducci-Tenerani middle school. He later studied classical painting and sculpture at the Scuola del Marmo, and then the Accademia di Belle Arti, both in Carrara, in the late 1950s to early 60s. He became a teacher and after a brief stint teaching in Sardinia, he and his English wife, Bridget Bailey, a market research psychologist whom he met in Carrara in 1962 and married in 1964, moved to London in 1965. He then dedicated himself entirely to his art, with a studio first in Kingston upon Thames, then later in Teddington, west London.
As well as selling privately, he exhibited widely from the 70s to the 90s, from Liverpool to Łódź. Fourteen of his etchings are held at the Auschwitz Museum in Oświęcim, Poland, and three of his paintings are in the Kraków Jagiellońskiego Museum’s European masters collection. In 1990, Polish TV produced Renzo Galeotti’s Primo Levi, a programme dedicated to his work.
He has been described as a neo-impressionist, but always eschewed labels for his art. Instead, he wrote: “I do not believe in explaining paintings. One can discuss them, but not explain them … I can talk about them, about the way in which they grew out of the empty canvas, but only the paintings can explain themselves.”
From small, intricate etchings to massive, spectacular canvases, they were all informed by a sense of a never-satisfied quest for completion, of the inherent fallibility of humanity, but also its eternal quest to attain the unattainable.
Renzo had been suffering from lung cancer for years, kept at bay through innovative treatment delivered through Charing Cross NHS hospital. Even so, he had been continuing to create until late last year.
He is survived by Bridget, and me.
