Designer, lives and works in Turin.
Artist since 1973, after having shared art with his brother Francesco and Maestro Lorenzo Alessandri in the period of the “Soffitta Macabra” in Turin, he dedicated himself for years to figurative art and, in particular, to the world of music.
From 1982 to 1987 author of television theme songs, the best known of which are: Buona Domenica, I Ragazzi della III C, La Giostra. Ferragosto OK, he collaborates as an author with several singers.
In 1991 – 1992 he won the Rino Gaetano award and the Viareggio award as a singer-songwriter.
Columnist, he participates in numerous episodes of the Maurizio Costanzo Show and as an actor in Alberto Silvestri’s Candid Camera.
In 1993 he published the story 3001 Spooky on Jork II, published by Mancuso editore.
He is an actor in the film “In camera mia” by Sergio Martino.
He spent a year on the island of Tonga before starting his artistic journey through painting.
It is not difficult to recognize, in Graziano Rey’s painting, the characteristics of an anthropological study that lasted years.
His work is the expression of a synthesis of archetypal signs and meanings, belonging to all humanity since its dawn. Having progressively distanced himself from the fictitious world of appearance, he begins to take back his primordial love, painting, convinced by the fact that only this simplicity of tools and techniques can metabolise the quantity of experiences he has undergone. Topics that he wants to communicate having assimilated the principles as philosophical truth.
Apparently the suggestion of the cave paintings transformed into contemporary art with paint and the techniques of dripping, grating, frottage and cast, techniques lent to surrealism which involve the switching of images into signs. Tormented pictorial surfaces, crossed by pasty and scratched signs, engraved, intersected, contrasting swirls, to express the discomfort and restlessness of a world and an existence in a perpetual state of precariousness, which the artist’s quivering creativity translates into modules visuals agitated in morphology and unsaturated chromatism, because contaminated like the reality suffered by the human condition, in an overly crowded world, where the pure souls of the artists can only interpret and anticipate the suffering and looming dramas.
Graziano Rey is an eclectic and extremely sensitive artist who creates informal works of high visual impact.
The works are carried out under the aegis of brilliant instinct, geometric signs that come to life as if they were musical notes within a pentagram.
(By the Venice Biennale)
A designer, he was forced to work from a young age for family reasons. The economic conditions and his character led him to immediately have a great connection with people. An extrovert, cheerful character, not constructed but with an irrepressible comedy, he was called repeatedly on national television, soon becoming a recognizable and recognized character.
In that period of his life he embraced musical and theatrical experiences. But life in Turin seemed cramped to him and he needed to escape from everyday life and dig into the depths of his soul to finally find a new way of expressing himself and realizing himself.
Where did he end up finding all this?? In the islands of Tonga where in a very short time, once again, he managed to capture the attention of the population to the point of becoming a close friend of the King. Him, his guitar and the days that passed.
However, every day brought him closer to the solution of what he felt inside and what would be his reason for living, in fact, after a year, he returned to Turin and in a very short space of time organized himself to express himself through painting.
Graziano Rey at the Maurizio Costanzo Show. In every situation the spectator was kidnapped and violently struck by personal emotions that only true artists always know how to give.
Having reached full maturity, he now articulates at almost regular rhythms, like the beating of his heart, the need to compose works and present them to people, who reciprocate every time with affection and exultation, competing to grab his works.
Material, now dramatic, now joyful, now light, now bloody but always immediate and direct. Now engaged in national and international projects, in 2014 he decided to commit himself to concrete events and events abroad.
Life goes by fast and the world is immense. But Graziano Rey runs quickly and knows that he will soon be able to hug him completely and talk to him. It will make him laugh and cry and always move and excite.
(Luigi Mazzardo)
The toy factory.
Histrion of color, pied piper, Willy Wonka, Graziano Rey in this collection of works takes on the role of story-telling artist who leads to the dream factory. A sort of journey into the enchanted universe of fairy tale imagery.
A visual and hypnotic journey into the worlds of language games à la “Alice in Wonderland” where reality can be overturned in its linguistic expression.
For this reason, Rey’s work, in addition to its playful and aesthetic character, brings with it a more complex level of reading and perfectly connected to his work on the chromatic textures and color weavings of his visual poetics. As a musician and composer, Rey knows how to harmonize the score for that never mechanical instrument that is painting, also managing to impersonate the role of chef of a nouvelle-cuisine of color using the raw material of desires.
Collage and painting merge in a kaleidoscopic game of fast formal inventions that generate empathy at first sight, often witty assemblages originating from visual puns: a conceptual short-circuit that derives from a material approach and a mixture of dense colours, to arrive at composing real visual whims, variations on the theme, pictorial pastiches that take inspiration from conceptual and poor art to then deconstruct the ethical rigor and the austere climate and reinterpret it in a game of playful works with an apparently naive taste.
In a moment of maximum celebration and cultural and media dominance of signature cuisine, the artist uses ropes and other humble materials to create visual delicacies and lively compositions that take inspiration from the compositional and formal research of the starred dishes so celebrated in these last years.
In this cycle of works Graziano Rey puts into action a device of inspiration that is the opposite of the mechanism in place in creative haute cuisine where dishes tend to take on a formal construction increasingly inspired by the art of visual composition with an intentional detachment from the traditional appearance of foods, in the artist’s case the inspiration starts precisely from the mimetic abstraction of the dishes made almost abstract, from the minimalist arrangement according to the now common stylistic features of nouvelle-cuisine.
Let’s also think about the Japanese art of creating false plate sculptures or sculpting food with abstract and geometric shapes.
The world of painted foods or sculpture-foods is based on a practice that is both evocative and interdictive of oral pleasure. Foods become hyper-realistic and seductive but decidedly inedible.
A pleasure evoked but postponed, suspended and inaccessible.
Therefore, a psycho-dynamic and pedagogical level of reading can be detected in this cycle of works apparently inspired exclusively by the pleasure of a regressive divertissement. The game is a world structured by respect for roles and rules, it is an immersed mental space regulated by codes of conduct and expectations of suspension of time. Art is a game that respects the rules of wonder and taste, and is a machine that produces desires regulated by a framework of rules.
The toy factory is ultimately a hyperbolic dream, a dream of dreams: the desire to cross the
threshold of the laboratory of infantile pleasure, of the place of creation of that suspended time that I am
games.
(Vittorio Raschetti)
