Flacons, boxes, flaskets, small vases, sweet roses...
     These are probably all the objects in small pictures by my favourite Italian painter and graphic artist Giorgio Morandi.
     After the well-known metaphysical still-lives from the 1913 - 1918, his work was realistic till the end of his life in 1964.
     Enlightened by local masters from the 13th to the 16th centuies he painted and etched motives, which could be seen as trivial, blank, boring, kitscher. But in their apparent simplicity they sound in poetry. They radiate monumental silence. They retract the spectator by their reduced colouring and shape.
     Morandi is looking at us from his self-portrait, but it is a look into his inner side not at himself. Which is mysterious and inaccessible. He is stoic, austere and strict, same in the views of still-lives or landscapes. At the same time he is warm in colour and soft in brush-stroke, with which he sculpts in a way that the shape stays real.
     In his times he received many oficial awards (he influenced our founders of art modernism), yet his work is a reflection of solitude, meditation. It beams out something human what is beyond expression.
     It is a must to see, to know, to live and to enrich the soul with pleasure.