​

The vein for art and painting in particular of Armando Velardo is immediately manifested with works that collect acclaim from the public and critics, who already in 1986 awarded him second place in the "Libero de Libero" prize in Settefrati. Since then he has participated in numerous painting awards, collective and personal exhibitions in Italy and abroad.

Armando Velardo devoted himself to art from a very young age. The first works in fact date back to the years of his higher studies, thanks to the encouragement of Professor Notari, who immediately sensed its potential.

​

Purely an independent and self-taught artist, Armando Velardo studied anatomy with interest to the point of acquiring such a mastery as to make it an instrument of expression.

With expressive clarity, he made the human body an intelligible alphabet, a natural instrument of expression.  The body for him is a source of inspiration and at the same time a means to express his inner world, made up of marked sensitivity and attention to social issues. The hands in the foreground, enlarged and nervous, the framed eyes, the split figures, the branched hair, the anatomy with exaggerated lines: the body in Armando Velardo's canvases speaks.  

​

Suffering motherhood, poverty, isolation, the loneliness of the marginalized, sensitivity  of homosexuals, the ultras ugly with inner ugliness, the drinker  alone, compared to the drinker of  assent of Edgar Degas in a contemporary version for his expressive power:  these and many others are the themes of his committed paintings.

"I represent the ugliness of the world as there shouldn't be and I would like to  than to provoke a reflection in those who stand in front of my canvases ".  

He alternated moments of instinctive expressiveness in which he created the forms of an architecture with decision and continuous strokes  complex to creative moments in which with a meticulous attitude he thought and built compositions with subsequent modifications  drafts on paper, up to the achievement of the objectives, which at times he reported on canvas.

​

"Armando Velardo developed in the  his career a pictorial investigation that recalls the avant-gardes of the early 1900s: his compositions are full of references and citations mediated by the history of art, meticulously filtered through a personal stylistic figure "so commented the curator Leonarda Zappulla in her dedicated pages to him in the international magazine Art Now (July-August 2019).

Build narratives  harmonics in the lines and in the chromatic compositions  that overcome the angularity  structured of the cubist compositions, creating a harmony that on a careful reading is in contrast with the treated themes. As if animated by a desire  to remedy the "ugliness of the world". The fascinating and captivating chromatism strikes and attracts the viewer to the work, inviting him to a more careful reading, towards contemporary, committed or complex themes that overcome  the pure aesthetic composition or decomposition.

​

​