Art Brokerage : Italian, B. 1933 - Antonio Possenti was born in Lucca January 11, 1933, and lives there today. An extremely important Italian surrealist, he is featured in the Lucca Possenti Museum dedicated to his art. Possenti is an extraordinary man and painter: very gentle, full of ideas, and an incomparable inventor for himself and others. Possenti is the delicate poet of surrealism which has been ignored until now. He lives in an incorrupt and unattainable world, in a daily and affectionate metaphysical dimension. An ideal son of Gauguin (but also of Matisse, Klee, Ensor, Ernst, the great Arab miniatures), Possenti is a very cultured painter of "Elsewhere". Not objective reality, not the purely linguistic research of the Avant-garde, but imagination is the explorative field of his paintings, in a tradition which, in Italy, dates hack to Savinio, Usellini, Clerici, and more recently to Pompa, Armodio and Foppiani. Possenti tells of Elsewhere, of an Orient which is not there, but which could have been, good-natured puppets with turbans, sinuous and turgid forms, warm precious colours and esotericisms that one does not know to what point they should be taken seriously. He tells of seas that can enter a house, shrewd fishermen, and fake, exhilarating lighthouses which trick navigators; he tells of magic skies marked with falling stars, woods and gardens which house minor crimes and curious individual virtues in their silence. He loves to tell stories.