Donnino Rumi
    ... Painter

    [Self Portrait, cm 97x100] [No Title, cm 50x60] This panorama of impressions is enough to show the richness of Rumi's culture, and it is here that wish to stop. Until a few years ago the tendency was to elevate those artists who appeared to be true expressions of their time and who showed originality in a personal way, within the language of their time. This however reduced the definition of an artist, and where it has taken us is well known, to dismiss all those artists branded historic (as in the case of Rumi). We are now witnessing a complete reversal of this position. It is, in fact, now the so called <<divergent lines>> that attract the scolars. To give an example - Balthus who enjoyed the most success at the Biennale of Venice in 1980 - painted, at the height of the abstract period, in a neo-fifteenth century manner, evoking in his art an anxiety and a malessere that was existential rather than social. He was not appreciated in the 50's and yet today is considered a <<great>>.
    [Still Life, cm 80x40] [Still Life Morta, cm 105x60] The argument is always the same one - the capacity of the artist to refute the conditioning of his own time and his choosing instead from history, from whence we all derive.
    This perfectly suits a painter like Donnino Rumi, who we admire toady, not only for his technical gifts, but also for his capacity to gather and collect from the past. It is always important that the process is not a passive one.
    How can it be, however, in our case ? One has only to look, for example, at the transformation of the Lautrechian model. Those female figures, bitter yet soft, grotesque yet lyrical, hardened yet pathetic. They remain examples of a femininity that go beyond centuries, as real today as yesterday. The force, almost anger, that one averts is a consequence of this desire to understand not only in an estetic, but also and maybe above all, in a moral sense.
    [No Title, cm 120x80] [Self Portrait, cm 110x80] For Donnino Rumi to understand this is to be modem. Man, no matter how many times fashion and ideologies change, remains fundamentally the same: obtuse and conceited, as in the portraits of Frans Hals, marked by vice and disillusion as in Toulouse Lautrec, anticonformist and proud as in Manet. The range is vast.
    Rumi has chosen a sector which to us seems one of the most vital and fertile. He has chosen to look at himself in the mirror (so many self portraits) and to understand himself better, his defects as a man, his anxieties, his weaknesses and his passions.
    [Senza Titolo, cm 70x110] 
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