Stefano Arienti

1961, Asola, Mantua, Italy

Stefano Arienti is one of the most original figures in contemporary Italian art. After graduating in Agricultural Sciences, he entered the art world in the 1980s, developing an experimental, ironic and conceptually incisive visual language. His practice encompasses drawing, painting, installation and interventions on humble or recycled materials, including newspapers, posters, schoolbooks and printed advertisements.

Arienti explores repetition, copying and transformation as creative tools, constantly moving between high culture and popular culture. For him, the artwork is an open field of visual manipulation, where authorship merges with manual gesture and collective memory. He has exhibited in major Italian and international institutions, including the Venice Biennale, MAXXI, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and Museo Madre.

In this diptych, Stefano Arienti reinterprets a celebrated Impressionist landscape by Claude Monet, presenting it not simply as a tribute, but as an exploration of vision and memory. Layers of plasticine are applied to the posters as though they were dense, material brushstrokes. The subject, a stretch of the Seine at Vétheuil, is reproduced twice, with subtle variations in light, mark-making and chromatic intensity.

The result is a dialogue between original and variation, nature and image, art history and contemporary gesture. The use of plasticine, a material central to Arienti’s practice, transforms a fleeting impression into a reflection on painting as time and accumulation. The work is both landscape and concept, beauty and an awareness of the act of seeing.