Lecture: Samuele Giovanoli – the “Paradise Painter” from the Fex Valley

Samuele Giovanoli (1877-1941), from a farming family in Soglio (Bergell), first accompanied his father at the age of eleven as he drove the cattle up to the alpine pastures in the Fex Valley during the summer. For the boy, it was love at first sight with the sunny valley, where he settled at the age of eighteen and spent the rest of his life. Giovanoli was an exceptionally sensitive mind with a pronounced thirst for knowledge and philosophical and literary interests. He learned German so he could read Nietzsche, Goethe, and Schiller in the original language. Painting, which he only learned autodidactically ten years before his death, became his ideal means of expressing his world of ideas and feelings. Giovanoli's paintings speak of his great love for the Engadine and Fex Valley landscapes, but also of his solitude within them. They express the painter's fundamental feeling of being surrounded by riddles and secrets, and his need to uncover these mysteries. It is worthwhile to explore the underlying depths that resonate in his depictions of nature, known as "paradise paintings," which immerse the seemingly idyllic in an enigmatic, sometimes even uncanny, atmosphere.
Misunderstood during his lifetime and initially forgotten after his death, Giovanoli is now recognized and appreciated beyond the borders of his canton as a representative of Swiss Naïve Art.
The lecture will be followed by the 20-minute documentary film "Samuel Giovanoli," which Swiss television DRS broadcast in 1978 as part of its "Das Monatsmagazin" series.