" La Costa Rosa" Print

“COLOUR AS THE PROTAGONIST” When you enter Rino Valido’s studio, in a building in the historical centre of Genoa, your first reaction is surprise. It is not big, but divided in two by an added storey. In the lower part, of two areas, you can see furniture and different objects, desks, tables, photographs, drawings, maquettes of graphic and architectonic works and, on the walls, paintings. You cannot really tell the job of the owner. Only the atmosphere makes it clear that he has little or nothing to do with his neighbours, who have on their doors brass plates with stiff qualifications. If you go upstairs through a steep stair, you enter a very tidy room full of file cabinets, computers, CDs, printers, scanners and other technical instruments. Also here you can find some projects, plans, elevations and some three-dimensional visualisations and models that seem to answer the question. He must be an architect, or an organiser, a graphic designer or an expert in image communication. When you move in the other room (the one that was “prepared” for the event, in the picture published at the beginning of this catalogue) the scenery totally changes: tables full of colours, tins and bottles with powders, terrae and other mysterious components, also liquids surrounded by brushes, spatulas and many paintings hanging or leaning on the on walls and stacked in piles on the floor. It must be the atelier of a painter. Then what? Are there two people working here with two different jobs? Or is the owner a sort of Doctor Jeckyll and Mr Hyde: the famous designer Valido, I obviously knew, above all for his works for Ansaldo, and the painter Valido, I must admit I did not know, notwithstanding my Genoese frequentations, who was showing me around to introduce me to his works? The answer is obviously the last one. After having answered this question there was still the doubt about this split personality showed without perplexities. I left this aside to concentrate, as I was supposed to do, on his paintings, many more than you can see in the above- mentioned picture: recent, very recent and of a long time ago, these, the only ones I had heard about indirectly through pictures not so commonly published also because of the reluctance of the author who, at the time, was more concentrated on his projects.