Bigarelli is a man who has seen a lot and travelled a lot. Hisjob has enabled
him to come face to face with realities far removed from ours, different situa-
tions, heritages of multiform civilizations.
But Bigarelli the artist, on the other hand, is someone whose aim is to portray
a large "gallery" of characters, as in times gone by when painters used to pro-
duce "series" of canvases commemorating a family from the nobility or the
history of a religious order.
It is a modernform, and a particularly unusual one, of '~ortraying history",
ofreproducing a visual ideal that has accompanied and still accompanys the
artist in a continual coherent search which has been going onfor many years.
He is passionately fond of painting and his output is prolific as he conti-
nuously keeps his hand in, something which might come as a surprise in
times such as ours where little attention is paid to technique in thefigurative
field of art. There is, however, a very close realtionship in this artist's make-
up between .the love of art per se and the sense of moral dignity he imparts to
his compositions. His is an eye that observes at close range and becomes in-
volved, a complicity which comes of deep fellow-feeling and is virtually unaf-
fected by the weight of preceding pictorial traditions.
His is an instinctive rapport with pictorial art, from the point ofview of emo-
tional sensibility, and no particular knowledge of history is needed to unders-
tand and appreciate it.
Bigarelli's pictorial world originatesfrom and develops in the artist's imagi-
nation, his creative power which is by no means closed to cultural suggestions
but is determined by an almost magical and meditative approach with thefi-
gures he is about to portray.
We do not know whether it would be more appropriate to refer to the concept
of inner "cognition " which is infused into all the subjects transfiguring them
in the painted image, or rather to the concept of adhesion to a reality expe-
rienced without any intellectualism and, therefore, a very personal reality, in
its most intimate meaning.
One thing we do know is that when viewing Bigarelli's works one is struck by
homogeneity and a single-minded intent which deserve a special mention in
the Italian contemporary art scene.
It is to be hoped that in the young, in particular, find his work; of interest, a
generation in search of aesthetical perspectives which are rich in artistic con-
tent and which prove that an artist can respect his art.

Claudio Strinati