Prospero Riva official

Prospero Riva, a colleague of Cea Perego, cannot be defined as just a "Sunday painter". His art is in fact deeper than what a simple hobby entails. Among his favorite subjects are the landscape of the Lombard metropolis; but he also cultivates the figure.
The "uncle from America": blessed are the ones who have been able to have one in their life; when this distant relative, perhaps never seen, passed away, a notary appeared, dollars and fortune arrived.
Even in the existence of Prospero Riva there was an "uncle from America". He didn't leave him any dollars, not even the shadow of a notary appeared at the door of his little house in Baranzate. But he left him a legacy.  An inheritance whose wealth only Prospero Riva is able to judge and he undoubtedly prefers it to a nice nest egg of dollars.
This uncle is called Antonio, a very good man with a passion for painting and a particular affection for little Prospero. Uncle Antonio was a Sunday painter: one of those, that is, who takes advantage of the holiday to give vent to his passion - today we call it hobby - and in the meantime gets a good breath of fresh air, after a week spent in the city, between home and workshop.
On Sundays, therefore, Uncle Antonio, equipped with a briefcase with brushes and colours, a canvas, a folding seat, with his nephew by the hand, would climb onto a train or one of those trams that go to the suburbs; he then wandered around a bit in search of the right subject and perhaps some inspiration and then he got to work.
Prospero, at first, preferred to jump around on the grass and do a roundabout with some dogs; then, when the image began to take shape and colour on the canvas, he was enchanted as if faced with a miracle.
His child's eyes ran from his uncle's attentive, busy face to the agile and decisive hand that moved the brush, to the painting that - for him it was a masterpiece - was born.
He didn't need to ask, when he turned ten Prospero received the desired gift from his uncle: a box of watercolors. It was a kind of investiture: from that day little Prospero became a "Sunday painter".
He too sat in his seat next to his uncle; they were inspired by the same subject, both with the same love and with the same commitment. Indeed, if it happened that one of them got distracted, it was Uncle Antonio who would keep an eye on his nephew's work and, perhaps gruffly, give some advice; but he could not help but be amazed and proud of the rapid progress that little Prospero was making and of the natural predisposition that he increasingly demonstrated.
Fourteen years have passed since then. That box of watercolors that Uncle Antonio gave to his nephew was so profitable that we can talk about it as an inheritance from an "uncle from America". Not to be calculated in dollars; but for Prospero it had an even greater value.
We met him at a modern art gallery in Milan, located right in the artistic heart of the city, a few steps from the Brera Academy.
Prospero Riva, thin, in a way, we would say almost shy, an open face, two clear eyes, moved on tiptoe among his paintings, almost dodging the visitors, perhaps in fear of distracting them from the attention they paid to his works .
Making him talk about himself was no easy feat. Prospero Riva was born in Milan on 1st February 1931. Since primary school, as soon as he had a pencil in his hand, he demonstrated great facility at drawing. Then you already know his relationship with Uncle Antonio.
After completing his studies, he works in a bank and gets married. In the meantime he naturally cultivated painting, the first exhibitions and the first prizes came. Then he leaves the bank and, as an industrial designer, goes to work for Cea Perego, electronic equipment.
For seven months his family has been growing: Marco has arrived, a little bundle of joy, but who for the moment has not inspired a painting from his father.
Enough. That's all he says about himself. And we have to believe him when we learn that he surprised his superiors, Dr. Caffarilla and the engineer Zanini, who only learned that they had a painter among their employees when Prospero Riva, timidly, presented them with the invitation for the his last exhibition.
He gets a little excited when he wants to show us that painting is not a hobby. He breaks an open door: even though we are not profound connoisseurs of this art, a glance at the paintings bearing his signature was enough for us to understand that we were faced with something more than a Sunday painter, with all due respect for uncle Antonio.
Yes, Prospero Riva also takes advantage of Sundays to go around "stealing" the subjects of his paintings, but the time he spends there is something else entirely. His paintings are born at night, the hours stolen from sleep, and yet what happiness.
His wife Anna takes part and appreciates his art, advises him and discusses it. Prospero smiles: the memory of an episode has surfaced that we forcefully wrest from his reticence. It is a painting, a simple paper boat, painted in that pale gray that he prefers. A little paper boat that said little to his wife while for him it sailed who knows where, in a sea of ​​fantasy, of poetry.
Well that little paper boat won a big prize at a Figurative Arts exhibition. From this family skirmish we have drawn the only known polemic of Prospero Riva's personality. Rather, we have captured in him the torment of the artist who always wants to say something new and is always afraid of not being able to say or of being able to say too little of the tumult of ideas he has within himself.
If he didn't know how to paint, he would like to play music, play any instrument, or better yet he would like to write. <Perhaps by writing, but by writing well, one would be able to express what one wants to say better, better than by painting. But I don't know how to write, so I paint.>
Prospero Riva has now participated in around thirty exhibitions, three of which are "personal". The awards and recognitions are also countless. He has an audience that appreciates him. At his last exhibition where he exhibited twenty-six paintings, a year's worth of work, almost all of them bore the "purchased" tag.
And for an opinion on his art, we leave the floor to the critic Mario Lepore, who wrote:
“The painter especially prefers the urban Milan landscape, where it has a modest yet characteristic and intimate poetry. But it is in this theme, both in the others of countryside and seaside, he always shows his fundamental qualities of good structure, of color that is generally low but well and often finely tuned, of sincere, romantic love for nature".
But in addition to landscapes, Riva also willingly dedicates himself
to the figures: the children with long, slightly sad faces
in a tender intimacy, they make him
remember the little boy who toddled at ten years old
behind Uncle Antonio, the "Sunday painter" who left him

such a pure legacy, a legacy he has only begun
to make it bear fruit, but which will certainly bring it
much further away, towards those ports where it will land
his paper boat again traveling in a sea

of ​​fantasy and poetry.
Gianni Montanari

1964