La Vita dell'Arte IV

The Life of Art (La Vita dell’Arte) renews its exhibition event this year in Villa Venino's Sale dell'Arte on the occasion of its fourth edition. 

The year 2023 is a particularly symbolic date for our town: one hundred years ago Giovanni Testori (writer, playwright, poet, critic, artist) was born, passing away at the age of 70 in 1993. This is an important anniversary for us, and for this reason within this exhibition we wanted to select some artists particularly close to Giovanni Testori: Filippo De Pisis, Giovanni Paganin, Bernard Damiano, Kei Mitsuuchi, Giancarlo Vitali, Sergio Battarola and Anna Santinello.

The Life of Art represents for us a great journey through time and creation: a journey we wish to be choral, polyphonic, bringing together artists of yesterday and today. Within the exhibition itinerary, the oldest work is a 19th-century male portrait (Man with a Glove) ascribable to the manner of Francesco Podesti, a well-known Italian painter of elegant manners: the gaze of this painting and its elegance enlighten us. The theme of the face, the body, the figure is strongly present here in the works of Casimir Reymond, Renato Guttuso, Gino Meloni, Giuseppe Migneco, Ernesto Treccani, Aligi Sassu, Giovanni Paganin, Domenico Spinosa, Bernard Damiano, Kei Mitsuuchi, Raffaele Capuana, Sergio Battarola, Alessandro Ferraro, Fabio Grillo, Chang Jiaqi and Liu Haibin. Each tells its own story and has its own life.

On the other hand, the theme of still life lives on in the unpublished work by Filippo de Pisis and Oscar Saccorotti, which we juxtaposed with the canvas of the young contemporary artist Andrea Bertoletti (a flower), moving testimonies of existence becoming painting. The living, sensual matter of sculpture tells its reality and vision in different forms with works by Arnaldo Pomodoro, Giovanni Paganin (vividly the face of Giovanni Testori created by him), Ren Rong and Anna Santinello.

The space narrated by Christo and Beuys, on the other hand, takes us back to the world of Land Art and Arte Povera, which brought to the life of art another consciousness as well as for the experience of video art present here in the works of Hsieh Yuen and Song Lu. We would like to conclude our brief journey to discover the works featured in the exhibition The Life of Art IV with two precious engravings that tell in a completely different way the space of the Interior that becomes a landscape of existence.

The authors are Giancarlo Vitali and Chinese artist Wang Nanhao.

The Life of Art is for us like a river that carries with its force, the forms of creation born in the course of time near and far, capable of moving and reflecting us.