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SOGNATORE DI SEGNI  //  PIRRO CUNIBERTI

May 12th - September 30th 2017

 

Sognatore di segni by Pirro Cuniberti.

Organised by Galleria d'Arte Maggiore G.A.M., Bologna.

Curated by Francesco Poli.

Location: DD47, 30123 Venice. 

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Opening hours: 11:00 - 18:00, closed Tuesdays.

On the occasion of the 57. International Art Biennale of Venice / La Biennale di Venezia, and a year since the late artist's passing, the exhibition pays tribute to Pirro Cuniberti, a great figure in Italian contemporary art.

 

Imposing but discrete, Pirro Cuniberti assimilated the european suggestions to create an original work in the world of painting or, better, of the drawing. The exhibition, curated by Francesco Poli, continues in fact the artist's choice to abandon painting to dedicate exclusively on on small dimension works on paper. In the exhibition a selection of works realised on the same sized paper, the usual A4, is transformed into a sort of mosaic made by little tiles composing Cuniberti's thought and his own unique visual language.

On the surface of the paper, Cuniberti develops his own imaginary alphabet with lightness and harmonic balance, using the basic elements of the pictorial language (like the sign, the line, the point, but also letters and numbers). In this way, the artist gives birth to landscapes, still lives and free figures, which are suspended shapes on the border between the world of imagination and memory, stories that are not forced to answer to a logical order, but rather are illusive appearances quickly taken in their manifestation and so forever fixed on the paper by traces of graphite and shadows of colors.

What clearly emerges from the exhibited works is the inspiration from Paul Klee's art, that Cuniberti could admire exactly at the Venice Biennale in 1948. “When I saw a Van Gogh I almost fainted, but then I saw Paul Klee's works and my feet were not touching the ground”. Starting from the great master's work, Cuniberti transforms the most geometric traits in a more fluid language and in an open universe of improvisation, where we can find traces also of his acute irony. Works with "hard signs, soft and faded signs, signs that enclose clear shapes, signs that allude, shelled signs, thrilling signs…" like the artist himself loved to define them. Therefore, the idea of the exhibition is to create a path that is entirely played into an ironic, lyrical, magic “signs' land”, where the artist moves with a light walk, bringing to our attention, from time to time, a fairy tones' landscape, a private and intimate world, a secret journey that becomes, however, real thanks to his “exact and allusive” painting like Francesco Arcangeli defined it. An inexhaustible research accomplished by an artist defined “patient like an archaeologist, rigorous like a scientist, gloomy and fantastic like an alchemist”.

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