Claudio Viscardi

Artistic career

Education and professional experiences

Like his ancestors from Misox - Claudio Viscardi comes from the eponymous dynasty of builders and architects who created famous buildings in southern Germany in the 17th century - the painter left Graubünden as a young man. More than three decades ago he found a new home in Ireland and established himself there as a painter.

Viscardi initially completed his artistic apprenticeship as a restorer of murals, including in the monastery of Müstair. With the acquired knowledge of old master fresco painting, he then began to try out his own tempera painting on canvas. In this rather rare and demanding painting technique, the painter makes his painting materials himself from pigments and casein and paints directly on a wet chalk ground. In this respect, Viscardi can be classified as an old master. A signal from ancient times

Viscardi has had his painting motif for decades, which he has varied and intensified since the beginning. These are constructive architectural views in archaic surroundings, mostly mountain or coastal landscapes and clouds.

The painting style is naturalistic, but the composition of the picture is multi-perspective, surrealistic. Imaginary spaces are created through different perspective vanishing points within an image. The tension between strict, idealized architecture and organic nature shapes the picture, i.e. the contrast between amorphous and symmetrical forms.

Humans appear, if at all, as a mythological signal from antiquity - sculptures on pedestals or columns, contour-like, disembodied. The result is an illusion painting that is now only taught in the Van Kelen School in Brussels, but which also touches on trends in recent contemporary art, such as that practiced by Lucy McKenzie.

The artist's ancestors were also famous...

Giovanni Antonio Viscardi, Chief architect at the Bavarian court
and  imperial court chief and master architect

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Many of his ancestors, such as  Giovanni Antonio and his father Bartolomeo, have been known to have worked as master builders, artist and architects north of the Alps since the middle of the 16th century.
Antonio Giovanni Viscardi reached the height of his work as a  architect.

The main work of this phase is the Pilgrimage church Mariahilf at Freystadt .

In 1702 Giovanni Antonio Viscardi was commissioned to continue enlarge the Nymphenburg palace. In 1706 Giovanni Antonio Viscardi was elected by the Imperial administration of Bavaria, as architect at the Bavarian court and in 1713 he was appointed imperial court chief and master architect of all Baveria.

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