From 1st June to 30th November, the Fondazione Emilio e Annabianca Vedova will be presenting two extraordinary and singular exhibitions to run concurrently, curated by Germano Celant: the first is Salt of the Earth by Anselm Kiefer, one of the most important contemporary artists, who has produced an installation especially for the Magazzino del Sale, the space restored by Renzo Pieno for the Fondazione. While the former studio of Emilio Vedova will instead provide the venue for the second exhibition, …in continuum, an imposing cycle of 108 canvases, most of which in black and white, produced in 1987-88. With these two new exhibitions, the Fondazione Emilio e Annabianca Vedova continues its process of dialogue in parallel, begun last year with “Louise Bourgeois: the Fabric Works” and “Emilio Vedova Sculptor”, between the Venetian artist and one of the leading exponents of contemporary art.

What sparked the idea of bringing two apparently distant albeit in some way communicating worlds together? What was the logic underlying the aim of metaphorically weaving their respective works together? First of all, both artists have pushed art towards an area of purification: Vedova by seeking to regenerate a sign or gesture that remained ever a “discharge” of life, and Kiefer aspiring to finding a point zero, however tragic and horrendous, from which to begin to “purge” his palette. Despite being two different and independent settings, Kiefer in the Magazzino del Sale and Vedova in his studio on the Zattere, their research nevertheless reveals the intention of causing a crisis in codified forms: an iconoclasm fired in the hope of finding a primary condition in painting: a double pilgrimage, physical and mental, tending to recover a new force and energy.

One hundred and height large canvases go to make up Emilio Vedova’s '...in continuum' (1987/1988), a choral, imposing and dramatic work conceived to express a fragmented, syncopated and transitory poetic vision within an extreme expressive tension. Through a sometimes casual overlay of the paintings, which constitute the main thinking behind the work, “...in continuum” is a sort of accumulation “without beginning and without end”: the randomness of the contacts and the infinite possible combinations constrain the gaze to an incessant movement to gain a sense of that inexhaustible energy. A spectacular and extraordinary stratification that the artist produced over a period of one year. White on black and black on white, “...in continuum” is a wall of (musical) scores that blend and become confused to form a concert in which, instead of “visual” sounds, the images interweave with each other to create ever new structures. In the studio of the artist, where the pictorial planes of the large recomposed canvases enter each other, hiding and highlighting each other, an infinite and temporary profundity is created, a materialisation of the pictorial force of the artist’s personal inner world. In the old boatyard the artist had chosen for his studio, the uninterruptedly changeable black and white of “...in continuum” recalls not only the shifting Venetian waters on which Venice lives and is reflected, but also archaic remains, broken images and deep sediments within a dramatic tension. “Water/plasma - ambiguous mobility - Flow… continuous…” “Mirrors… infinite echoes, visual references, memories, precipitous dizziness”, as Vedova himself wrote.