Coazzolo - The Church of Tremlett

«Shapes and colours have an unprecedented strength, they can hold a ceiling, open a wall, raise an arch».

It’s David Tremlett himself, a British artist among the greatest exponents of mural art, who defines the meaning of his artistic intervention on the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Carmine of Coazzolo. Shapes and colors are forces of nature: as concrete as the earth that we have under our feet, living like the vineyards that run on the rows. Transforming forces, similar to the patient peasant work that harmonizes man’s times with those of the cosmos, in a fragile and often turbulent (and yet possible) balance that has become a World Heritage Site on these hills.

But what exactly is the work of Tremlett? Artistic recovery, wall drawing, land art? Expression of the painter or tribute to the landscape of Coazzolo? The answer’s in the middle.

In the work of the British artist, private and collective dimension blend in a creative process that embraces time and space. The time of work, first of all, which for two years engaged Tremlett and Silvano Stella, who privately commissioned the work, in the search for the appropriate place, in the formulation of drafts, in the choice of colors. The space of the landscape, then. But also the one of the community of Coazzolo that welcomed the artist, hosted him, collaborated actively in the transformation of the church into a work of art, materializing what Silvano Stella defined: «the infinite dialectic between man and landscape, between us who inhabit places and transform them, sometimes losing the aesthetic sensitivity that our predecessors seemed to possess naturally».

The intervention on the Church of Coazzolo, completed in 2017, is part of a twenty-year collaboration between Tremlett and the Langhe. In 1999 the artist repaints, with Sol Lewitt, the Chapel of Brunate, surrounded by the vineyards of La Morra. If at La Morra, however, the chosen colors are bright and lysergic, as if to distinguish themselves from the perfect order of the rows, for Coazzolo the choice of color is empathetic. Yellow, ochre, orange, grey, sienna and green: the colors follow the shades of the hills in the succession of the seasons in a perfect correspondence between nature and artifice, between imagination and spontaneity, between "interior" nuances and external evidences.

Other works by David Tremlett are now visible inside the seventeenth-century chapel of Relais Saint Maurice, in Saint Stephen Belbo, and in the ex-oratory of Saint Michael, located in the historic center of Serravalle Langhe.