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Looking and recognising

Picchio's artistic talent was already evident during his school years. But Picchio only made art his profession after decades of successful entrepreneurial activity. This has seemingly little to do with the latter. And yet the entrepreneur has shown abilities and qualities that are now, in one way or another, also those of the artist: Creativity, a wealth of ideas and inventiveness in general, and in particular a distinct spatial imagination, a strong optical memory.

When Picchio came to Ticino and began to paint the villages, inspired by their beauty, the first thing that struck him was the segmentation of their closely interlocked architecture, their optical dissolution in vertical stripes, or in diagonal stripes if one relates them to their mountainous surroundings. Thus he already found his segmental style. And style has its special weight with an artist whose declared principle is to transform reality and not to depict it realistically.

For the latter is the task of photography, which he masters professionally but which fascinates him less, which has no direct connection with painting even with common themes - flowers above all - at most the indirect one that abstraction is denied to photography in the strict sense. And then, of course, it is particularly exciting to follow how the closely observed flower acquires a geometric order in the painter's reduction that refers to its scientific lawfulness.

And Picchio's painting pushes towards abstraction in flowing transitions that make the thematic seem secondary and at the same time make us aware that the colour blue, for example, can also be a theme. Boundaries become blurred when the silhouette of a big city like New York reflected in the water in another painting imperceptibly merges into pure construction. Spatiality is also already inherent in the impasto application of acrylic paint with a palette knife, which imperceptibly turns the picture into a relief.

The colours are applied unmixed and only combine in the eye of the perceiver, in the sense of divisionism, to create the corresponding colour effect - whereby those who look at it are all the more involved in the picture. And this opens the way to the third dimension, to the idiosyncratic pictorial objects for which the artist combines differently painted panels in a modular unit format to create ever new installations that offer a completely different view depending on the point of view. 

The joy of colour - yes, of strong colours - and of form is the drive of the artist who works with relish, the joy also of the nature and art lover of the Ticino cultural landscape, its villages and especially its flowers, which he hikes through every day. But everything can become a theme for the artist who is still not alienated from the world of business and who accepts even a concrete commissioned work from business circles as a welcome stimulus without any fear of contact - on the self-evident condition that he only accepts such a commission on the condition that he approaches the given ideas in artistic freedom, even and especially in monumental format. Industrial processes can then, thanks to an intimate familiarity with them, lead to suggestive pictorial inventions. Or collages and assemblages are created in which banknotes and pieces of money or cuttings from business newspapers suddenly gain a critical and poetic expressiveness as symbolic image carriers.

This is connected to the fact that none of Picchio's works emerges gradually from gestural intuition, but each one is clearly present in his mind from the beginning and, based on an existing sketch, only needs to be realised. This corresponds to the grasping temperament of the artist who purposefully organises his work. And when such sketches, like the already realised works, are stored in the computer, the artist, with all the instinctive traits of his work, proves to be at the height of his time. He gains essential impulses precisely from repeating and differentiating a once-tried pictorial idea in series under technically facilitated conditions: for example, the fantastic view over the cloud-covered peaks of the Alps as they fly overhead at changing times of day and year.

And if the obvious - Ticino's nature as well as the demands of the business world - can always be the stimulus, then language may be too. It was probably the curious question of a grandson as to whether he could also create graffiti that gave Picchio the idea for his linguistic images. They, too, are primarily visuals, visual representations - paradoxically of phenomena that are so sensually suggestive that their verbal designation becomes almost obsolete. Parts of letters swirling in confusion convey the attitude to life of jazz, those laced in glowing colours that of sex. And the components of the word stress are so frighteningly knotted together that we see in them a feeling of life that threatens us every day, transposed at close quarters.

Martin Kraft 

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To the installations of Picchio

Like his sculptures, Picchio's new flexible wall installations can also be related to his painting, only with them he goes one step further. He now transfers the painterly principle of segmentation, the structuring of the picture by stripes, to fully sculptural picture bodies, wooden cubes in modular unit format, to which he also applies the acrylic paint with a palette knife. Set up individually, which is quite possible in itself, they could be called steles. But the idea is actually different, aimed in the direction of a variable installation entirely related to the respective spatial situation. For the individual

steles can be leaned against a wall, preferably in groups of several, in any combination and at any angle. They are freely movable, can be turned upside down at will, rotated on their own axis and moved around the room in any way, and in extreme cases even hung on the wall again like a picture.

In view of these unlimited possibilities for variation, the viewers or owners themselves now become part of the installation. The artist can suggest a certain arrangement, but he does not want to prescribe it. And it is not least the temporal dimension of such installations that is essential, as they can be changed at any time by nuances or from the ground up. But even spatially unchanged, they react particularly strongly to light, especially in their partly monochrome colour effect. With the constant secret invitation to rearrange them, they radiate a playful cheerfulness. 

Martin Kraft  

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An entrepreneur becomes an artist

The artistic career of Picchio (Dieter Specht) is probably unique. For forty years he was successfully active in the management of the company he co-founded, the Interroll Group in Germany and Switzerland (in S.Antonino/Ticino). It is true that his great artistic talent had already shown itself in his youth; but there was little time to pursue it in all those years. Then, however, he withdrew from the business in order to work as an artist just as professionally from then on. These seem to be two worlds that are difficult to reconcile. Picchio, however, makes it clear that crucial qualities he demonstrated as an entrepreneur are also those of the artist: Creativity, productivity, innovative spirit, imagination, vision, the ability to think spatially. And he pursues his new profession essentially just like his old one: with relish, professionally, with full commitment. The fact that he has been away from the art business for a long time is now also proving to be an advantage: this has secured him the impartiality to find and invent his personal style, independent of trends and fashions.

Even as an artist, Picchio has not broken off contact with the business world. He can accept commissions from business circles without fear of contact and fulfil them so well precisely because he is no stranger to this world - all this on the natural condition that he is granted full artistic freedom despite the given subject matter. The artist's professional approach corresponds to his planned public relations work. He knows that large-format works in particular cannot be placed in a completely arbitrary location, but seek contact with their surroundings. Art in the workplace is an essential part of corporate culture. It can contribute decisively to the good atmosphere in a company, which benefits the employees as much as the visitors. Equally at home in both worlds, Picchio also acts as an ideal advisor and mediator here.

Martin Kraft

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Instinct and rigour

Instinct and rigour

In a gallery that is constantly working on a selection for a good exhibition, Tondinelli in Via Quattro Fontane in Rome, opens on Wednesday the solo exhibition of the famous German artist, Picchio [Dieter Specht], who lives and works in Arcegno (in the canton of Ticino/Switzerland)....

The title of the exhibition is "Segments" and could lead to misconceptions: for instance, geometric divisions of the painted surface could be thought of, similar to what was seen in the first decade of the last century through the group of the so-called "golden session", with Leger, Metzinger, Fresnaye and others, an experience that marks the transition from analytical cubism to synthetic.

But the complicated operations of geometry and mathematics, which in a way are even represented in meditated abstract Zionism and even in Dada, are essentially unknown in the painting of Picchio [Dieter Specht].

Here is neither adventure nor coding; despite the precise programming of the work "very present and determined from beginning to end", accompanied by the energetic temperament of the artist, ready to organise his own work. It is the creative instinct that finally produces the poetic-fantastic result. For the rest, his works are of a balanced professionalism and objectively vivid. 

I limit myself, among others, to Crash, a very beautiful painting, even if the designation means collapse, break, bang, it seems, on the contrary, to express a sensitive, light charisma of acrylic work. Segments, the title for the entire exhibition, prompts the idea of a rigorous omission of the usual cliché of imitation, against all presumption and whimsical invention.

Prof. Renato Civello, Art critic,

in Secolo d’Italia, 1 Febbraio 2004

“Appuntamenti con l’Arte”

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