Gianluigi Serravalli was born in Ferrara, and he brings  his  city  inside

himself. He has the Ferrara artist’s ability to filter the observation of life, and there where the fog falls to dim the senses, he resorts to his fantasy supported by a good patronage of culture. Serravalli is an original artist, not tied to the traditional schemes; canvas and palette are foreign to his way of creating his works. His means of expression are such that, even in the logical development of tools, have  the  flavour  of  the

renaissance. He prepares materials and matter, as if the preliminary phase, which for someothers boils down to the purchase in a well supplied shop, were for him the real start of the creation of the painting. His subjects are mostly manufactured objects: man, even when unseen, is the master, and is impending. Serravalli therefore hunts for walls, roofs, plastered panels, both plain and richly ornate, lightening them with segments of sun and slivers of moon that upset the natural wrapping of light, purposefully revealing the human manufacturing. In his sceneries of overbearing cathedrals, cranes that languish in the moonlight like heartbreaking mechanical Pierrots, ribcages made of bridges lost against vague squarish backgrounds of palaces, one perceives the golden development of their architecture and the sad unharmonious scattering of their remains. Here and there, incongruous and at the same time essential, emblematic small figures materialize, with a feeling of metaphysics, of quotation and dream: transfigured animals, hesitating men, masks of play and deception.

And women too: small figures luxuriously rotund, a far cry from the thin, almost incorporeal masses, barely bolstered by the winking tanga thongs , typical of the beauties of nowadays. His women flaunt as trophies the cellulitical lavishness that made the history of painting, and represent the true ideal of beauty - generous in cholesterol and imbued of the Emilian character-sybaritically cherished by the artist.
And that’s not all. When the metaphysical inspiration, that howls in the hair of his beard in the full moon nights, becomes more forceful, irony takes its place, so that his Italian squares become populated no longer with symbolical lifeless dummies, but with broken down monuments to arthritic horses, or pelicans coughing their souls out; or, even more, with himself, represented in some mocking self-portrait of man that can laugh of himself.

The century that has just closed, has pierced his bones and his soul, leaving its marks on him. It was the century that made neurosis grow exponentially, transforming it into research, anger, torment, and , mostly, art, of the barely imaginable frontiers. It was art that helped man float over the cruellest waters in a mostly cruel century, art that generated extraordinary and complex craftsmen.
Serravalli lives his section of the twentieth-century-ism in a nostalgic and at the same time dynamic way, as though he meant , canvas after canvas, that this century is over, but not its propelling power, and that it is unwise, in this fog, to take oneself too seriously and underestimate what could be around.
No wonder, then, he was born in Ferrara.

(Translation by Marco Sinchetto)